Necroscope

Gulping audibly, the man on his right stood up, stepped to the speaker, pressed a button marked 'Receive'. There was momentary static, then a clear hiss fading away as the belly of the corpse in the other room slowly settled; down in folds of fat. But while yet the gas escaped, instead of drawing back, the naked man lowered his face, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, filling his lungs!

With his eyes glued to the one-way screen, fumbling and clumsy, the official found his chair again and seated himself heavily. His mouth, like that of his opposite number, had fallen open; both men now perched themselves on the front edges of their chairs, their backs ramrod straight, hands gripping the wooden arm rests. A cigarette, forgotten, toppled into the ashtray on the table to send up fresh streamers of perfumed smoke. Only the watcher in the middle seemed unmoved, and he was as much interested in the expressions on the faces of his subordinates as he was in the weird ritual taking place beyond the screen.

The naked man had straightened up, stood erect again over the deflated corpse. He had one hand on the dead man's thigh, the other on his chest, palms flat down. His eyes were open again, round as saucers, but his colour had visibly changed. The normal, healthy pink of a young, recently scrubbed body had entirely disappeared; his grey was uniform with that of the dead flesh he touched. He was literally grey as death. He held his breath, seeming to savoir the very taste of death, and his cheeks appeared to be slowly caving in. Then -

He snatched back his hands from the corpse, expelled foul gas in a whoosh, rocked back on his heels. For a moment it seemed he must crash over backwards, but then he rocked forward again. And again, with great cure, he lowered his hands to the body. Gaunt and grey as stone, he stroked the flesh, his fingers trembling as they moved with butterfly lightness from head to toe and back again. Still there was nothing erotic in it, but the left-hand man of the trio of watchers was moved to whisper:

'Is he a necrophile? What is this, Comrade General?' 'Be quiet and learn something,' the man in the middle growled. 'You know where you are, don't you? Nothing should surprise you here. As for what this is — what he is — you will see soon enough. This I will tell you: to my knowledge there are only three men like him in all the USSR. One is a Mongol from the Altai region, a tribal witch-doctor, almost dead of syphilis and useless to us. Another is hopelessly mad and scheduled for corrective lobotomy, following which he too will be… beyond our reach. That leaves only this one and his is an instinctive art, hard to teach. Which makes him sui generis. That's Latin, a dead language. Most appropriate. So now shut up! You are watching a unique talent.'

Now, beyond the one-way window, the 'unique talent' of the naked man became galvanic. As if jerked on the strings of some mad, unseen puppet-master, his burst of sudden, unexpected motion was so erratic as to be almost spastic. His right arm and hand flailed towards his case of instruments, almost tumbling it from its table. His hand, shaped by his spasm into a grey claw, swept aloft as if conducting some esoteric concerto — but instead of a baton it held a glittering, crescent-shaped scalpel.

All three observers were now craning forward, eyes huge and mouths agape; but while the faces of the two on the outside were fixed in a sort of involuntary rictus of denial — prepared to wince or even exclaim at what they now suspected was to come — that of their superior was shaped only of knowledge and morbid expectancy.

With a precision denying the seemingly eccentric or at best random movements of the rest of his limbs — which now fluttered and twitched like those of a dead frog, electrically coerced into a pseudo-life of their own — the arm and hand of the naked man swept down and sliced open the corpse from just below the rib-cage, through the navel and down to the mass of wiry grey pubic hair. Two more apparently random but absolutely exact slashes, following so rapidly as almost to be a part of the first movement, and the cadaver's belly was marked with a great T with extended top and bottom bars.

Without pause, the hideously automatic author of this awful surgery now blindly tossed away his blade across the room, dug his hands into the central incision up to his wrists and laid back the flaps of the dead man's abdomen like a pair of cupboard doors. Cold, the exposed guts did not smoke; no blood flowed as such; but when the naked man took away his hands they glistened a dull red, as if fresh painted.

To perform this opening of the body had required an effort of almost Herculean strength — visible in the sudden bulging of muscles across the naked man's shoulders, at the sides of his rib-cage and in his upper arms — for all the tissues fastening down the protective outer layers of the stomach must be torn at once. Also, it had been done with a fierce snarl, clearly audible over the radio link, which had drawn back his lips from clenched teeth and caused the sinews of his neck to stand out in sharp relief.

But now, with his subject's viscera entirely exposed, again a strange stillness came over him. Greyer than before, if that were at all possible, he once more straightened up, rocked back on his heels, let his red hands fall to his sides. And rocking forward again, his neutral blue eyes turned down and began a slow, minute examination of the corpse's innards.

In the other room the man on the left sat gulping continuously, his hands clawing at the arms of his chair, his face gleaming with fine perspiration. The one on the right had turned the colour of slate, shaking from head to toe, rapidly panting to compensate for a heart which now raced in his chest. But between them ex-Army General Gregor Borowitz, now head of the highly secret Agency for the Development of Paranormal Espionage, was utterly engrossed, his leonine head forward, his heavily jowled face full of awe as he absorbed each and every detail and nuance of the performance, ignoring as best he might the discomfort of his juniors where they flanked him. On the rim of his consciousness a thought formed: he wondered if the others would be sick, and which one would throw up first. And where he would throw up.

On the floor under the table stood a metal waste bin containing a few crumpled scraps of paper and dead cigarette ends. Without taking his eyes from the one-way screen, Borowitz reached down, lifted the waste bin up between his knees and placed it centrally on the table before him. He thought: Let them fight it out between them. In any case, and whichever one let the down side, his vomiting would doubtless elicit a response in the other.

As if reading his mind, the man on the right panted, 'Comrade General, I do not think that I — '

'Be still!' Borowitz lashed out with his foot, catching the other's ankle. 'Watch — if you can. If you can't, then be quiet and let me!'

The naked man's back was bowed now, bringing his face to within inches of the corpse's exposed organs and entrails. Left and right his eyes darted, up and down, as if they sought something hidden there. His nostrils were wide, sniffing suspiciously. His brow, hitherto smooth, was now furrowed in a fantastic frown. He resembled in his attitude nothing so much as a great naked bloodhound intent upon tracking its prey.

Then… a sly grin tugged at his grey lips, the gleam of revelation — of a secret discovered, or about to be discovered — shone in his eyes. It was as if he said, 'Yes, something is in here, something is trying to hide!'

And now he threw back his head and laughed — laughed out loud, however briefly — before returning to a more frantic scrutiny. But no, it wasn't enough, the hidden thing would not be exposed. It shrank down out of sight, and glee turned to rage on the instant!

Panting furiously, his grey face trembling in the grip of unimaginable emotions, the naked man snatched up a slim tool whose sharpness shone in mirror brightness. In something of an ordered manner at first, he commenced to cut out the various organs, pipes and bladders; but as his work progressed so it grew ever more vicious and indiscriminate, until the guts as they were partially or almost wholly detached hung out of the body over the edge of the fluted metal table in grotesque lumpy rags, flaps and tatters. And still it was not enough, still the hunted thing eluded him.

He gave a shriek which passed through the speaker into the other room like chalk sliding on a blackboard, like a shovel grating in cold ashes, and grimacing hideously began to hack off the dangling gobbets and hurl them all about. He smeared them down his body, held them to his ear and 'listened' to them. He scattered them wide, tossed them over his hunched shoulders, hurled them into the bath, the sink. Gore spattered everywhere; and again his cry of frustration, of weird anguish, ripped through the speaker:

Not there! Not there!'

In the other room the gasping of the man on the right had turned to a wretched choking. Suddenly he snatched I he waste bin from the table, lurched upright and stag gered away to a corner of the room. Borowitz grudgingly gave him credit that he was reasonably quiet about it.

'My God, my God!' the man on the left had started to repeat, over and over, each repetition louder than the one before. And, 'Awful, awful! He is depraved, insane, a fiend!'

'He is brilliant!' Borowitz growled. 'See? See? Now he goes to the heart of the matter…'