A Soft Barren Aftershock by F. Paul Wilson
Jessie says I’m too scared of making waves. She’s probably right. She usually is. I do know I couldn’t have made it through the trial without her. She stuck by me all the way.
She’s right about the waves, though. All I want to do is live in peace and quiet and practice the medicine I’ve been trained for. That’s all. I don’t need a Porsche or a mansion. Just Jessie and our kids and enough to live comfortably. That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.
Wednesday afternoon, two days after the Mosely house call, I was standing on Doc Johnson’s front porch, ringing his bell.
“Stop by the house this afternoon,” he’d said on the phone a few hours ago. “Let’s get acquainted.”
I’d been in town seven months now and this was the first time he’d spoken to me beyond a nod and a good-morning while passing in the hall at County General. I couldn’t use the excuse that my office was too busy for me to get away, so I accepted. Besides, I was curious as to why he wanted to see me.
I’d spotted Joe Mosely on my way over. He was coming out of the liquor store and saw me waiting at the light. He looked terrible. I wasn’t sure if it was just the daylight or if he was actually thinner than the other night. His cheeks looked more sunken, his eyes more feverish. But his smile hadn’t changed. The way he grinned at me had tied my stomach into a knot that was just now beginning to unravel.
I tried not to think of Mosely as I waited for someone to answer my ring. I inspected my surroundings. The Johnson house was as solid as they come, with walls built of the heavy gray native granite that rimmed the shore in these parts. Little mortar was visible. Someone had taken great pains to mate each stone nook and cranny against its neighbor. The resultant pattern was like the flip side of one of those thousand-piece Springbok jigsaw puzzles that Jessie liked to fiddle with.
His verandah here high on East Hill—the only real hill in town—offered a clear eastward view of the length and breadth of the bay all the way down to Blind Point; beyond the barrier island the Atlantic surged cold and gray. To the west lay the Parkway—the low drone of its traffic was audible most nights, but that was a minor concern when you considered how easy it made getting to places like picturesque Cape May to the south and glitzy Atlantic City to the north.
And beyond the Parkway, the deep and enigmatic Jersey Pine Barrens.
I could get used to this.
I thought about Doc Johnson. I’d heard he was a widower with no children, that his family had come over with Ludlum Bay’s original settlers back in the seventeenth century. Doctors apparently came and went pretty regularly around the Bay, but “the Doc”—that’s what the natives called him—was as constant as the moon, always available, always willing to come out to the house should you be too sick to go to him. If you were a regular patient of the Doc’s he never let you down. People talked as if he’d always been here and always would. His practice seemed to encompass the whole town. That was impossible, of course. No one man could care for 20,000 people. But to hear folks talk—and to listen to the grumbling of the few other struggling doctors in town—that was the way it was.
The handle rattled and Doc Johnson opened the door himself. A portly man in his sixties with a full, friendly, florid face and lots of white hair combed straight back, he wore a white shirt, open at the collar, white duck pants, and a blue blazer with a gold emblem on the breast pocket. He looked more like a yacht club commodore than a doctor.
“Charles!” he said, shaking my hand. “So good of you to come! Come in out of the chill and I’ll make you a drink!”
It wasn’t as chilly as it had been the past few days but I was glad to step into the warmth. He was fixing himself a Sapphire gimlet with a dash of Cointreau and offered me one. I was through for the day, so I accepted. It was excellent.
He showed me around the house that one of his ancestors had built a couple of centuries ago. We made small talk during the tour until we ended up in his study before a fire. He was a gracious, amiable host and I took an immediate liking to him.
“Let’s talk shop a minute,” he said after I refused a refill on the gimlet and we’d settled into chairs. “I like to feel out a new doctor in town on his philosophy of medicine.” His eyes penetrated mine. “Do you have one?”
I thought about that. Since starting med school I’d been so involved in learning whatever there was to know about medicine that I hadn’t given much consideration to a philosophical approach. I was tempted to say Keeping my head above water but thought better of it. I decided to go Hippocratic.
“I guess I’d start with ‘Above all else do no harm.”
He smiled. “An excellent start. But how would triage fit into your philosophy, Horatio?”
“Horatio?”
“I’m an avid reader. You will forgive me a literary reference once in a while, won’t you? That was to Hamlet. A strained reference, I’ll grant you, but Hamlet nonetheless.”
“Of course. But triage . . .?”
“Under certain circumstances we have to choose those who will get care and those who won’t. In disasters, for instance: We must ignore those whom we judge to be beyond help in order to aid those who are salvageable.”
“Of course. That’s an accepted part of emergency care.”
“But aren’t you doing harm by withholding care?”
“Not if a patient is terminal. Not if the outcome will remain unchanged no matter what you do.”
“Which means we must place great faith in our judgment, then, correct?”
I nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”
Where was this going?
“And what if one must amputate a gangrenous limb in order to preserve the health of the rest of the body? Isn’t that doing harm of sorts to the diseased limb?”
I said, “I suppose you could look at it that way, but if the health of the good tissue is threatened by the infected limb, and you can’t cure the infection, then the limb’s got to go.”
“Precisely. It’s another form of triage: The diseased limb must be lopped off and discarded. Sometimes I find that triage must be of a more active sort where radical decisions must be made. Medicine is full of life-and-death decisions, don’t you think?”
I nodded once more. What a baffling conversation.
“I understand you had the pleasure of meeting the estimable Joseph Mosely the other night.”
The abrupt change of subject left me reeling for a second.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a pleasure.”
He barked a laugh. “There’d be something seriously wrong with you if you did. A despicable excuse for a human being. Truly a hollow man, if you’ll excuse the Yeats reference—or is that Eliot? No matter. It fits Joe Mosely well enough: no heart, no soul. An alcoholic who abused his children mercilessly. I patched up enough cuts and contusions on his battered boys, and I fear he battered his only daughter in a far more loathsome way. They all ran away as soon as they were able. So now he abuses poor Martha when the mood suits him, and that is too often. Last summer I had to strap up three broken ribs on that poor woman. But she won’t press charges. Love’s funny, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said. “But codependency isn’t.”
“You’ve got that right. Did you notice his mangled foot, by the way? That happened when he was working at the shoe factory. Talk is he stuck his foot in one of the machines on purpose, only he stuck it in farther than he intended and did too good a job of injuring himself. Anyway, he got a nice settlement out of it, which is what he wanted, but he drank it up in no time.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said, remembering his rapidly dwindling level in his gin bottle.
“And did you notice the lack of electricity? The power company caught him tampering with the meter and cut him off. I’ve heard he’s blackmailing a few people in town. And he steals anything that’s not nailed down. That cut on his arm I sewed up? That was the first time in all these years I’d ever had a chance to actually treat him. He tried to tell me he did it
“You didn’t report him to the police?”
“No,” he said levelly. “And I don’t intend to. The courts won’t give him his due. And calling the police is not my way of handling the likes of Joe Mosely.”
I had to say it: “Mosely says you put something in the laceration when you sewed it up.”
Doc Johnson’s face darkened. “I hope you will consider the source and not repeat that.”
“Of course not. I only mentioned it now because you were the accused.”
“Good.” He cleared his throat. “There’s some things you should know about the Bay. We like it quiet here. We don’t like idle chatter. You’ll find that things have a way of working themselves out in their own way. You don’t get outsiders involved if you can help it.”
“Like me?”
“That’s up to you, Charles. You can be an insider if you want to be. ‘Newcomer’ and ‘insider’ aren’t mutually exclusive terms in Ludlum Bay. A town dies if it doesn’t get some new blood. But discretion is all important. As a doctor in town you may occasionally see something out of the ordinary. You can take it as it comes, deal with it, and leave it at that—which will bring you closer to the inside. Or, you can talk about it a lot or maybe even submit a paper on it to something like the New England Journal of Medicine, and that will push you out. Far out. Soon you’d have to pack up and move away.”
He stood and patted my shoulder.
“I like you, Charles. This town needs more doctors. I’d like to see you make it here.”
“I’d like to stay here.”
“Good! I do my own sort of triage on incoming doctors. If I think they’ll work out, I send them my overflow.” He sighed. “And believe me, I’m getting ready to increase my overflow. I’d like to slow down a bit. Not as young as I used to be.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
He gave me a calculating look. “Okay. We’ll see. But first—” He glanced outside. “Well, here it comes!” He motioned me over to the big bay window. “Take a look!”
I stepped to his side and gazed out at the Atlantic—or rather, where the Atlantic had been. The horizon was gone, lost in a fog bank that was even now rolling into the bay itself.
Doc Johnson pointed south. “If you watch, you’ll see Blind Pew disappear.”
“Excuse me?”
He laughed. “Another reference, my boy. I’ve called Blind Point ‘Blind Pew’ ever since I read Treasure Island when I was ten. You remember Blind Pew, don’t you?”
N. C. Wyeth’s painting of the moonlit character suddenly flashed before my eyes. It had always given me the chills.
“Of course. But where’s the fog coming from?”
“The Gulf Stream. For reasons known only to itself, it swings in here a couple of times a winter. The warm air from the stream hits the cold air on the land and then we have fog. And I do mean fog.”
As I watched, lacy fingers of mist began to rise from the snow in the front yard.
“Yes, sir!” he said, rubbing his hands together and smiling. “This one’s going to be a beauty!”
Mrs. Mosely called me Friday night.
“Doctor, you’ve got to come out and see Joe.”
“No, thank you,” I told her. “Once was quite enough.”
“I think he’s dying!”
“Then get him over to County General.”
“He won’t let me call an ambulance. He won’t let me near him!”
“Then I’m sorry—”
“Please, Doctor Reid!” Her voice broke into a wail. “If not for him, then for me! I’m frightened!”
Something in her voice got to me. And I remembered that bruise on her cheek.
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “I’ll be over in a half hour.”
I knew I’d regret it.
The fog was still menacingly thick, and worse at night than during the day. At least you could pick out shadows in daylight. At night the headlights bounced off the fog instead of penetrating it. Like driving through cotton.
When I finally reached the Mosely place, the air seemed cooler and the fog appeared to be thinning. Somewhere above, moonlight struggled to get through. Maybe the predicted cold front from the west was finally moving in.
Martha Mosely opened the door.
“Thank you for coming, Doctor Reid. I don’t know what to do! He won’t let me touch him or go near him! I’m at my wit’s end!”
“Where is he?”
“In bed.”
She led me to a room in the back and stood at the door clutching her hands between her breasts as I entered.
By the light of the room’s single flickering candle I could see Joe Mosely lying naked on the bed, stretched out like an emaciated corpse. In fact, for a moment I thought he was dead—his breathing was so shallow I couldn’t see his chest move.
Then he turned his head a few degrees in my direction.
“So, it’s you.” His lips barely moved. The eyes were the only things alive in his face.
“Yeah. Me. What can I do for you?”
“First, you can close the door—with that woman on the other side.”
Before I could answer, I heard the door close behind me. I was alone in the room with him.
“And second, you can keep your distance.”
“What’s the matter? Anything hurt?”
“No pain. But I’m a dead man. It’s Doc Johnson’s doing. I told you he put something in that cut.”
His words were disturbing enough, but his completely emotionless tone made them even more chilling—as if whatever emotions he possessed had been drained away along with his vitality.
“You need to be hospitalized.”
“No use. I’m already gone. But let me tell you about Doc Johnson. He did this to me. He’s got his own ways and he follows his own rules. I’ve tailed him into the Pine Barrens a few times but I always lost him. Don’t know what he goes there for, but it can’t be for no good.”
I took out my stethoscope as he raved. When he saw it, his voice rose in pitch.
“Don’t come near me. Just keep away.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m here. I might as well see if I can do anything for you.”
I adjusted the earpieces and went down on one knee beside the bed.
“Don’t! Keep back!”
I pressed the diaphragm over his heart to listen—
—and felt his chest wall give way like a stale soda cracker.
My left hand disappeared up to the wrist inside his chest cavity. And it was cold in there! I yanked it out and hurled myself away from the bed, not stopping until I came up against the bedroom wall.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said in that passionless voice.
As I watched, a yellow mist began to ooze out of the opening. It slid over his ribs and along the sheet, and from there down to the floor, like the fog from dry ice.
I looked at Mosely’s face and saw the light go out of his eyes.
He was gone.
A wind began blowing outside, whistling under the doors and banging the shutters. I glanced out the window on the far side of the room and saw the fog begin to swirl and tear apart. Suddenly something crashed in the front room. I pulled myself up and opened the bedroom door. A freezing wind hit me in the face with the force of a gale, tearing the door from my grip and swirling into the room. I saw Martha Mosely get up from the sofa and struggle to close the front door against the rage of the wind.
The bedroom window shattered under the sudden pressure and now the wind howled through the house.
The yellow mist from Mosely’s chest cavity caught the gale and rode it out the windo
Then the mist was gone and I was alone in the room with the wind and Joe Mosely’s empty shell.
And then that shell began to crumble, caving in on itself piece by piece, almost in slow motion, fracturing into countless tiny pieces that in turn disintegrated into a gray, dust-like powder. This too was caught by the wind and carried out into the night.
Joe Mosely was gone, leaving behind not so much as a depression in the bedcovers.
The front door finally closed with Martha’s efforts and I heard the bolt slide home. She walked up to the bedroom door but did not step inside.
“Joe’s gone, isn’t he?” she said in a low voice.
I couldn’t speak. I opened my mouth but no words would come. I simply nodded as I stood there trembling.
She stepped into the room then and looked at the bed. She looked at the broken window, then at me. With a sigh she sat on the edge of the bed and ran her hand over the spot where her husband had lain.
My home phone rang at eight o’clock the next morning. It didn’t disturb my sleep. I’d been awake all night. Part of the time I’d spent lying rigid in bed, the rest here in the kitchen with all the lights on, waiting for the sun.
An awful wait. When I wasn’t reliving the scene in the Mosely bedroom I was hearing voices. If it wasn’t Joe telling me that Doc Johnson had put something in his wound, it was the Doc himself talking about making life-and-death decisions, about triage, all laced with literary references.
I hadn’t told Jessie a thing. She’d think I was ready for a straitjacket. And if by some chance she did believe, she’d want to pack up and get out of town. But where to? We had the baby to think of.
I’d spent the time since dawn going over my options. And when the phone rang, I had no doubt who was calling.
“I understand Joe Mosely is gone,” Doc Johnson said without preamble.
“Yes.”
. . . a hollow man . . .
“Any idea where?”
“Out the window.” My voice sounded half dead to me. “Beyond that, I don’t know.”