The Brain Eaters

Chapter 17

Corey Macklin and Doc Ingersoll sat with their heads close together at Corey’s desk in the Milwaukee Herald office. Corey was trying to pay attention to what Doc was saying while watching the ash on the older man’s Camel grow longer and droop precariously over his chin.

“It’s all set up for you and me and a photographer at St. Bartholomew’s, one o’clock,” Doc said.

“Why a private hospital?” Corey asked. “Why not the county morgue?”

“Because they’ve already cut up a couple of these people at the morgue and they’re getting nervous about it, for reasons that we will see. Or so Dexter Horn tells me. What’s the matter?”

“Would you for Christ’ sake flick the ash off that cigarette?”

As Doc removed the Camel from his mouth and examined it, the three-quarter-inch ash let go and filtered down to the papers on Corey’s desk.

“Oops.”

Corey rolled his eyes as Doc blew ineffectually at the gray flecks. “Never mind. Shall we get some lunch before we go?”

“We’d better. From what Dexter tells me, we might not feel much like eating afterwards.”

“I’ll go rustle up Jimbo.”

Corey found the bearded young photographer in the lounge sitting on one cracked plastic chair with his feet up on another. His eyes were half-closed, his hands jammed into his pockets.

“Ready to go, Jimbo?”

“I’m ready, but I’m not going.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man’s got another assignment for me. Hot story.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re handing out citizenship awards at the city-council luncheon.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Would I kid about this? You think I want to be shooting up good film on one suit handing a worthless plaque to another suit when I could be getting shots of a cut-up corpse? To me this is not a kidding matter.”

Corey believed him. Next to big chests on women, Jimbo Tattinger liked best to take pictures of gore. Nobody loved a head-on collision more than Jimbo.

“Did Uhlander personally tell you this?”

“Personally and in the bulging flesh.”

Corey’s first impulse was to rush into the city editor’s office and ask what the hell he thought he was doing, but he thought better of it on the way there. Nathan Eichorn had warned him there would be obstacles if he persisted in the story. Knowing the owner’s reputation, he guessed the reassignment of Jimbo would be only the beginning. No point in escalating the battle. He settled for throwing a scowl at Uhlander’s closed door as he passed on his way back to the city room.

“There won’t be a photographer,” he told Doc Ingersoll.

“No?”

“It seems Uhlander wants to use Jimbo on the citizenship awards at the city council.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Sure it is.”

Doc stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “I see.”

Corey said, “You and I had better get out of here before one of us gets tagged to go along with him and write the captions.”

They stopped for lunch at Heinkel’s Bratwurst Gardens, then drove in Corey’s car out to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Wauwatosa.

The pathology lab in the basement of St. Bartholomew’s was small but well equipped. It smelled sharply of disinfectant. There was only one dissection table, a stainless-steel contraption with a drain at one end for escaping body fluids. At the other end was a sink and a hanging scales.

On the table lay the nude, drained body of a white female. The gray flesh across her stomach sagged in loose folds. Her lower belly bore the navel-to-pubis scar of an old hysterectomy. High on the inside of her right thigh was an open slash four inches long. The severed end of a rubbery artery protruded from between the lips of the wound.

The hair on the woman’s head and her pubis was curly black with wiry gray strands running through it. She had a mole with a hair growing from it on one earlobe. But it was her face that commanded attention. The flesh was covered with raw, puffy lesions like boils that had burst. The woman’s dead eyes were mercifully closed.

Dexter Horn stood by silently while the reporters looked over the body. The little pathologist clutched a linen handkerchief in one hand. He used it nervously to blot his scalp where the few strands of black hair looked drawn on.

Doc Ingersoll introduced the pathologist to Corey.

“I’ve been reading your stories in the Herald,” Horn said.

“I’m glad somebody has.”

“I think a lot more people will be reading you pretty soon. You’ve maybe got a bigger story than you know.”

Corey looked down at the dead woman. “What’s the background on this one?”

Horn consulted a clipboard. “Helena Gotch, Caucasian female, age fifty-four, married. Lived in West Allis. Friday night, while cooking dinner, she came screaming out of the kitchen with a cleaver and went after her brother. He’d been staying there since her husband went crazy and scalded himself to death in their shower a week before.”

“Jesus,” Corey said softly.

“It doesn’t get any prettier. She lopped off part of the brother’s ear before he ran out of the house and jumped over a fence. She took off up the street screaming. Couple of motorists thought she was in trouble and tried to help. She left one of them with a broken jaw, the other with internal injuries. Finally died when she tried to run through a plate-glass window and sliced open her femoral artery.”

“That’s the wound on her leg?”

“Right.”

“What happened to her face?” Doc Ingersoll asked.

“The brother said it just bloomed like that all of a sudden. The blisters swelled up and popped while she ran around screaming. Her husband had the same face. They all do.”

The picture of Vic Metzger rose up in Corey’s mind. That triggered another association.

“You say her name was Gotch?”

“That’s right.”

“Who was the husband?”

“Let me see.” Dexter Horn flipped back a page on the clipboard. “Karl Gotch. Sheet metal worker. Age fifty-five.”

Karl Gotch, beer drinker, member of the bowling team, and destroyer of the pinball machine at Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern. Now he had been destroyed by an affliction like the one that had hit Vic and Hank Stransky before him. And now his wife. Corey saw a chilling pattern begin to emerge.

“Did you do the autopsy on the husband?”

“Yeah, and half a dozen others.”

“What did you find?”

“I’ll give you a copy of my report, but first I want to open this one up so you can see for yourself.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

Dexter Horn pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. He selected a knife from a tray beside the table and cut the scalp from one ear down along the back hairline to the other ear. He grasped the flap of detached skin like a bathing cap and pulled it forward over the woman’s face. Then he used a rotary bone saw to slice off the top of the skull. He set it aside and revealed the yellow-gray mass of the brain. With a curved knife he cut through the connecting tissue, then lifted the jellylike brain out of the skull and plopped it on the enameled surface of the table.

“Come here.” He beckoned Corey closer. “Take a look.”

Corey and Doc Ingersoll leaned over the exposed brain where Horn was pointing. Corey began to wish he had passed up the bratwurst and sauerkraut lunch.

“What are we supposed to be looking for?”

Horn touched the brain with the point of a knife. “Here’s one.”

Corey squinted and saw a dark speck on one of the ridges of the dead brain.

The point of the knife shifted. “Here’s another.”

Corey followed the steel point and saw the second speck.

“And another.”

“What are they, maggots?”

The pathologist was offended. “Of course not. You think we leave these stiffs lying out in the alley or something? This baby’s been in the freezer since they brought her in. Anyway, flies don’t breed under the skull.”

“Okay, so what are they?”

“I’ll be able to show you better under a microscope,” Horn said. He selected an area of the cerebrum and sliced off a wafer of brain tissue. He examined it and smiled, holding it up for the others to see.

“Got one of the little suckers here.” He carried the tissue sample to a binocular microscope mounted on a table along the wall and sandwiched it between two glass slides. He adjusted the instrument, then beckoned Doc and Corey over.

Corey peered through the eyepieces and felt a chill ripple down his back. What he saw looked like a short, segmented worm. With teeth. It seemed to be emerging from a tunnel in the spongy brain tissue. He raised up and looked at Dexter Horn while Doc Ingersoll took his turn at the microscope.

“What is it?”

“My best guess is that it’s a parasite of some kind. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before. I’ve been trying to classify it ever since I opened up the first head and found a bunch of them. So far, no luck. None of my references list anything like it.”

Doc straightened and backed away from the microscope. His face was paler than usual. “God, that’s ugly. Is it alive?”

“Not now,” Horn told him, “but it was. Apparently it feeds on living brain tissue. When the brain dies, it dies.”

Corey took another look. “There are clusters of little black dots around it. What are those?”

“Eggs,” said Horn.

The impact of what he had just heard came gradually to Corey. For a moment he thought the bratwurst was coming up, but he swallowed hard and kept it down.

“You mean these things eat their way into the brain and lay eggs there?”

“Stripped to the essentials, yes.”

“How do they get there?”

“From the victims I’ve looked at, traces in the blood vessels seem to indicate the eggs — they’re much too small to be seen by the naked eye — are carried to the brain by the circulatory system. There they hatch, and the parasites start eating their way through cerebral cortex. That’s the outer layer of the brain … the well-known gray matter.”

“Could that cause a headache?” Corey said, remembering the last moments of Hank Stransky’s life.

“The brain itself has no feeling,” Horn said, “but as these things eat through blood vessels, it causes multiple cerebral hemorrhaging, and that — let me tell you — can bring on the king of headaches.”

“What about the violence? These people lash out at anybody and anything close to them.”

“It’s entirely possible that the nervous system is affected as bits of the brain are consumed, bringing on the irrational acts of violence.”

Doc Ingersoll swallowed audibly. “Is it okay to smoke in here?” he said.

“I don’t care,” the pathologist said. He nodded toward the brainless corpse on the table. “And she doesn’t care. So go ahead.”

Doc gratefully set fire to a Camel and sucked in the smoke. He exhaled with a long “ahhhhh!”

“Someday let me show you the lungs of a guy who smoked like you do,” Horn said. “They look like chunks of anthracite.”

“I’ll pass,” Doc said. “There are things a man’s better off not knowing.”

Corey was leaning over to stare at the brain of Helena Gotch. With no support from the protective skull, it was flattening out like a pudding under the force of gravity.

“How do these things get into the bloodstream in the first place?” he asked.

“You understand we haven’t had a lot of time to study this,” Horn said, “but I’ll show you what I think.”

The pathologist turned back to the dissecting table. Corey and Doc stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. He pointed out several tiny nicks on the now-bloodless shins of the woman. The skin around them was dotted with tiny scabs.

“Bites?” Doc asked.

Horn shook his head. “Little breaks in the skin caused when she shaved her legs. Barely noticeable ordinarily. But an insect bite would do just as well. That’s all the opening the eggs would need. In other cases I’ve been able to trace the travel of the eggs through the bloodstream from some skin break to the brain, and I’ll bet that’s what happened here.”

“But where do the eggs come from? How do they get into the skin break?”

“Hey, I’m just a pathologist. Once you get outside the body, you’re in somebody else’s territory. I know those eggs can be carried for short distances in the atmosphere, but like all parasites, they won’t live long without a host. I thought maybe you guys would have an idea about where they come from.”

Corey looked at Doc Ingersoll. “Maybe we do,” he said.

“What causes those broken blisters on her face?” Doc asked. “You said the other victims had the same thing.”

“In the other cases I’ve found eggs adhering to the edges of the ruptured flesh. Probably will on this one, too. This is just another guess, you understand, but they could have been carried from the brain, back through the bloodstream, into the tiny capillaries of the face. There they produce some kind of an irritant that causes the flesh to swell up and burst.”

“Like a seedpod,” Corey said.

“More or less.”

“Blowing the eggs out into the atmosphere to get into anybody nearby who’s got a cut finger or a scraped knee.”

“I suppose it could happen that way,” Horn said.

Doc said, “Why go to all that trouble? Why wouldn’t they just hatch there in the brain where there’s plenty of food?”

“Once these things start eating at it, the brain and the brain’s owner are not going to last very long. Survival of the parasites requires that they find a new source of food or perish.”

“Ergo, the exploding face,” Doc said.

For a long moment the three men were silent, staring down at the violated corpse. Finally, Corey said, “How come all this hasn’t been published?”

“There’s been pressure to keep it quiet.”

“Pressure from where?”

“I don’t know, but from high enough to clamp a lid on the whole department. But we can forget about that now. After this latest batch it won’t matter if the pressure comes from God; the story’s going to come out. Your paper’s already touched on it, so I figured you might as well get it first. Besides, I owed Doc a favor.”

“Consider it paid in full, pal,” said Ingersoll.

“Want to watch me open up the rest of her?” Horn said.

“No, thanks,” Corey said quickly. “We’ve got work to do.”

As they rode up in the elevator from the chilly basement, Doc said, “If Dexter Horn is right, we could all be into some real heavy trouble with this. What do you think?”

“I think,” Corey said, “that we’ve just been handed the greatest headline you ever saw.”

“Headline?”

Corey held up both hands, framing the invisible banner headline. “Just picture it, Doc: Attack of the Brain Eaters!”