The Least Detailed Plans of a Great & Complicated Apparatus: Tales of the Bloody Scalpel, #5

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THE LEAST DETAILED PLANS OF A GREAT & COMPLICATED APPARATUS

I. The Neander Valley

THE FALL OF twenty feet killed the tiger, but did not kill Cree.

Lean and sinewy, Cree had been running and climbing and punishing his body his entire twenty-six rains. He was powerfully built—like any ape—and owned a thick, protuberant brow and under it large, wide set eyes that appeared ever attentive. His skin was thick and leathery and largely hairless. The sun had parched it the earthy color of burnt ochre.

The landing broke his left arm just above the elbow. It also fractured his skull. Cree lay unconscious, a pool of congealed blood under his head and arm, until his people found him. Beside him lay the dead tiger, spitted on Cree’s spear, which had passed directly through the animal’s once powerful heart. The people oohed and awed at this mystical stroke of fortune and skill. They dragged them both back to the dwelling place, a cave in the low hills on the edge of the valley. A shaman examined Cree by torchlight. She said a chant of hard guttered consonants and soft vowel sounds, ka-ka-ka followed by ti-ti-ti over and over again, then pulled on Cree’s arm until the exposed bone slipped and popped and sunk back under its leathery hide.

When he didn’t wake by dawn, the gathered men carried Cree to the mouth of the cave and turned him on his side. They pressed his low gut until he pissed, then fingered his hole until he shat. They turned him onto his back and the shaman, the single woman present, parted Cree’s dirty hair. She found a wound just above his right ear.

The shaman, Raha the people called her, was greater than thirty rains and thus one the elders of their clan. She was slightly built, with a palsied arm and one leg shorter than the other as if it had always been so. The gash she discovered in Cree’s head began to bleed anew as she poked it with a finger made half again as long by a horny, thick nail. A small boy of no more than ten rains knelt on his haunches in the dirt nearby and Raha eyed him. The elder grunted loudly and pointed to a wooden bowl. The boy tripodded insect-like across the ground with a skewed leg bent outward and fused ninety degrees at mid-thigh. He carried the bowl between his teeth just as if he’d be born to such tasks. The shaman indicated with her good hand that he should crush the bowl’s contents.

The boy sat back on his haunches and worked a stone pestle in the bowl. Dung beetles and giant ants wiggled and snapped their pincers as the boy crushed them to a gloppy mess. At Raha’s bidding he held the bowl up and she spat in the glop from time to time.

The men gutted the tiger and added the animal’s stomach juice and bowel gruel to the boy’s bowl. He worked the mixture to a thin paste and handed it off to the shaman.

Raha sniffed, grimaced, and grunted approval.

They laid the unconscious man in the dirt. Several men held Cree’s head and Raha took up a sharp stone. Cree pissed as she incised the side of his head and enlarged the cut. She checked the bleeding with black dirt from the dark innards of the cave, aware from long experience that too much bleeding would not end well. Next, she rocked the sharp edge of a stone chisel back and forth against Cree’s skull. She carved a crevice, deepening it until she broke through to the meat below. She repeated her efforts three more times—grunting and sweating all the while—finally prying out a square of bone the size of a large beetle.

Raha swept her bony fingers into the hole and under the edge of Cree’s skull, sinking the longest—with its ugly, too long nail—to the second knuckle. A large clot pushed out and the gray surface of Cree’s primitive brain came into view. The shaman spat and wiped her own forehead in her fatigue. She filled the hole in Cree’s head with as much paste from the boy’s bowl as it would accept, and wrapped his head in the hide of the tiger he’d so remarkably killed. Later, she made a necklace of the tiger’s eyeteeth and put this around Cree’s neck.

Many days later, Cree regained consciousness. His arm healed more crooked than did his head, and he would always have the beetle-sized divot in his skull to remind the people how sacred he now was. He wore always the tiger’s eyeteeth as a trophy. He aged very slowly after that, living another three score rains, an impossibly long time. He outlived Raha, outlived every one of the people present that remarkable day, outlived even their children, and most of their children’s children.

When his spirit finally fled his body, the people washed and wrapped his mortal remains in the hide of the very same tiger he’d killed, whose yellowed eyeteeth still hung around his neck. This high honor was made greater yet as hundreds of dung beetles and other insects were wrapped in the hide with him. Thus reduced in time, his holy bones and sacred skull were buried under the dirt at the back of a cave in what would later be called the Neander Valley of Germany, where they moldered undisturbed for 100,000 years.

II. Jolly Frye, M.D.

THREE DAYS AFTER his twenty-first birthday, Jolly Frye completed a two year program of study at the Baltimore College of Medicine in Maryland. The first year he’d been third in a class of twenty-two, but by graduation he stood first of the nineteen remaining, a feat less difficult than one might assume since the second year was merely a repeat of the first year’s lectures. By then he had run his hands through the decomposing entrails of exactly two cadavers: the remains of a person of low character who had died incarcerated in Ravenstown Debtors Prison on the banks of the Chesapeake River; and, from the local hospital, a fat, unfortunate little man whose girth reminded him of a woman seven months with child and whose skin was as yellow as the Virginia summer grass. He had died with pale, chalky stools and a water-filled belly, from an inflammation of the liver if such a thing be judged by the pocked and shriveled appearance of the organ.

A doctor fresh from schooling is akin to a loaded gun. Or better, a horse yet to be broken—for a new doc needs nothing if not to be broken himself. What the young Jolly knew coming out of Baltimore Med was mostly book learnt: a little pharmacy, a bit less anatomy than his butcher, and still less of the conundrum that is the body at war with itself. He was, in fact, very much akin to an engineer who has been privy to the least detailed plans of a great and complicated apparatus, yet has seldom beheld the device for himself. He had some rudimentary inkling of how the body worked, though only in the theoretical. In plain terms, Jolly had studied disease in its many manifestations, but mostly from afar. He was book learnt and lacked practical knowledge.

His most interesting possession was an ancient skull, bronzed with a patina of age, given him by an ancient professor of surgery named Otto Chadwick. The German—he spoke English with that over-articulated ‘Veek for Week’ accent—had learned his surgical arts at the abattoirs of European masters long before Jolly was born. Born in the Neander Valley of Germany, he was a small, delicate man of impeccable appearance with an affinity for string ties. He had come to the States during the late war and a bullet to the head had stroked his dominant arm at Petersburg in 1864. He had miraculously recovered and stayed after the North’s victory. Despite the apoplexy and the coarse tremor that ensued, the otherwise useless hand and arm moved with unequaled grace during surgery. Indeed, he was the most skilled surgeon in Baltimore for the fifteen years immediately following the Civil War.

Professor Otto Chadwick was not only apoplectic, but perhaps prophetic in addition. Not a few said he was mad, being nocturnal by nature and prone to long rants if disturbed unaccountably in his office or especially while operating. He spent his days with a single-minded fervor behind the knife, often berating himself and those around him for the mildest perceived slight. He bid his nights in the seamier parts of Baltimore, where he lived alone in a large home with only a youngish widow woman—he referred to her as his housekeeper—for company. In the summer of 1881 he presented Jolly with an interesting gift at the end of his second year of study, writing in an attached note ‘I am done. This will bring out the best in you—and the worst as well I fear.’ The professor then died of a brain hemorrhage on the very day Jolly Frye graduated. The cryptic note was thus never explained.

Also unexplained—and largely unmentioned, at least in polite company—were the soul-less cretins found in the professor’s basement some weeks after his death. They numbered a half dozen, more or less for the accounts of the matter were vague and shadowy—the stuff from which legends are kindled. His housekeeper claimed no knowledge of their presence. A big-boned, intemperate woman, salacious and alcoholic, she was confronted and run out of town at the point of a pitchfork.

Tainted, one official said.

Stained by the devil’s work, said another.

A neighbor shouted Witch! and things deteriorated from there. The drunken woman was spared the pyre, but only by the thinnest margin.

The cretins themselves scattered to the countryside. Or perhaps they were destroyed with the burning of the house. Rumors and legend. Apocryphal tales. Superstition and myth.

The newly minted doctor had no use for any of this, including the gift. He had known the Professor just well enough to accompany him on three or four of his nightly rounds, of which he never spoke again. He had no idea why the doctor would gift him, let alone make it a dying wish. The gift, he discovered upon opening the box, was a skull. Jolly, an eager student of both medicine and anatomy, was amused.

He examined it and noted the curious presence of a hole above the right ear. An irregular square, somewhat larger than a two bit piece. He found he could drop a walnut through the hole without touching the edges. It would rattle around the braincase a bit and fall out when he turned the skull over. Probably a war wound Jolly decided, though the skull looked too old to have belonged to a veteran of the late war between the states. Something else as well, something near unholy. In Jolly’s hands at least, the skull seemed infused with the spirit of the dead German.

This last idea sounded crazy, insane even, but Jolly couldn’t shake the notion. Couldn’t part with the skull either. He tossed it away in the alley trash one evening. The next morning it was back on the table in his dining room, no explanation. Jolly didn’t think he’d gotten up in the night to retrieve the skull, but he had found mud on his sheets that morning. He couldn’t explain this. Jolly was no longer amused.

The next week Jolly went so far as to bury the cursed