Everything's Eventual

hairline scars. His testes must have swollen up to damned near the size of grapefruits.'

   'Lucky he didn't lose one or both.'

   'You bet your . . . you bet your you-knows,' she says, and laughs that mildly suggestive laugh again. Her gloved hand loosens, moves, then pushes down firmly, trying to clear the viewing area. She is doing by accident what you might pay twenty-five or thirty bucks to have done on purpose . . . under other circumstances, of course. 'This is a war-wound, I think. Hand me that magnifier, Pete.'

   'But shouldn't I—'

   'In a few seconds,' she says. 'He's not going anywhere.' She's totally absorbed by what she's found. Her hand is still on me, still pressing down, and what was happening feels like it's still happening, but maybe I'm wrong. I must be wrong, or he would see it, she would feel it—

   She bends down and now I can see only her green-clad back, with the ties from her cap trailing down it like odd pigtails. Now, oh my, I can feel her breath on me down there.

   'Notice the outward radiation,' she says. 'It was a blast-wound of some sort, probably ten years ago at least, we could check his military rec—'

   The door bursts open. Pete cries out in surprise. Dr. Arlen doesn't, but her hand tightens involuntarily, she's gripping me again and it's all at once like a hellish variation of the old Naughty Nurse fantasy.

   'Don't cut im up!' someone screams, and his voice is so high and wavery with fright that I barely recognize Rusty. 'Don't cut im up, there was a snake in his golf-bag and it bit Mike!'

   They turn to him, eyes wide, jaws dropped; her hand is still gripping me, but she's no more aware of that, at least for the time being, than Petie-Boy is aware that he's got one hand clutching the left breast of his scrub-gown. He looks like he's the one with the clapped-out fuel pump.

   'What . . . what are you . . .' Pete begins.

   'Knocked him flat!' Rusty was saying—babbling. 'He's gonna be okay, I guess, but he can hardly talk! Little brown snake, I never saw one like it in my life, it went under the loadin bay, it's under there right now, but that's not the important part! I think it already bit that guy we brought in. I think . . . holy shit, doc, whatja tryin to do? Stroke im back to life?'

   She looks around, dazed, at first not sure of what he's talking about . . . until she realizes that she's now holding a mostly erect penis. And as she screams—screams and snatches the shears out of Pete's limp gloved hand—I find myself thinking again of that old Alfred Hitchcock TV show.

   Poor old Joseph Cotten, I think.

   He only got to cry.

AFTERNOTE

It's been a year since my experience in Autopsy Room Four, and I have made a complete recovery, although the paralysis was both stubborn and scary; it was a full month before I began to get back the finer motions of my fingers and toes. I still can't play the piano, but then, of course, I never could. That is a joke, and I make no apologies for it. I think that in the first three months after my misadventure, my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. Unless you've actually felt the tip of a pair of postmortem shears poking into your stomach, you don't know what I mean.

   Two weeks or so after my close call, a woman on Dupont Street called the Derry Police to complain of a 'foul stink' coming from the house next door. That house belonged to a bachelor bank clerk named Walter Kerr. Police found the house empty . . . of human life, that is. In the basement they found over sixty snakes of different varieties. About half of them were dead—starvation and dehydration— but many were extremely lively . . . and extremely dangerous. Several were very rare, and one was of a species believed to have been extinct since midcentury, according to consulting herpetologists.

   Kerr failed to show up for work at Derry Community Bank on August 22nd, two days after I was bitten, one day after the story (PARALYZED MAN ESCAPES DEADLY AUTOPSY, the headline read; at one point I was quoted as saying I had been 'scared stiff ') broke in the press.

   There was a snake for every cage in Kerr's basement menagerie, except for one. The empty cage was unmarked, and the snake that popped out of my golf-bag (the ambulance orderlies had packed it in with my 'corpse' and had been practicing chip-shots out in the ambulance parking area) was never found. The toxin in my bloodstream—the same toxin found to a far lesser degree in orderly Mike Hopper's bloodstream—was documented but never identified. I have looked at a great many pictures of snakes in the last year, and have found at least one which has reportedly caused cases of fullbody paralysis in humans. This is the Peruvian boomslang, a nasty viper which has supposedly been extinct since the 1920s. Dupont Street is less than half a mile from the Derry Municipal Golf Course. Most of the intervening land consists of scrub woods and vacant lots.

   One final note. Katie Arlen and I dated for four months, Novem ber 1994 through February of 1995. We broke it off by mutual consent, due to sexual incompatibility.

I was impotent unless she was wearing rubber gloves.

At some point I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems to be such a pervasive fear. When I was a kid of seven or so, the scariest TV program going was Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the scariest AHP—my friends and I were in total agreement on this— was the one starring Joseph Cotten as a man who has been injured in a car accident. Injured so badly, in fact, that the doctors think he's dead. They can't even find a heartbeat. They are on the verge of doing a postmortem on him—cutting him up while he's still alive and screaming inside, in other words—when he produces one single tear to let them know he's still alive. That was touching, but touching isn't in my usual repertoire. When my own thoughts turned to this subject, a more—shall we say modern? —method of communicating liveliness occurred to me, and this story was the result. One final note, regarding the snake: I doubt like hell if there's any such reptile as a Peruvian boomslang, but in one of her Miss Marple capers, Dame Agatha Christie does mention an African boomslang. I just liked the word so much (boomslang, not African) I had to put it in this story.

The Man in the Black Suit

I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I. I've never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will . . . at least not with my mouth. I've decided to write it down, though, in this book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can't write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don't think it will take long.

   Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked DIARY after its owner has passed along. So yes—my words will probably be read. A better question is whether or not anyone will believe them. Almost certainly not, but that doesn't matter. It's not belief I'm interested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I've found. For twenty years I wrote a column called 'Long Ago and Far Away' for the Castle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way—what