Final Reckonings
First Carol Publishing Group Edition I990
Copyright © 1987 by Robert Bloch
Indvidual stories were copyrighted in their year of first publication. For details and renewal dates see acknowledgements section.
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ISBN 0-8065-4144-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FINAL RECKONINGS
Copyright
Mannikins of Horror
Almost Human
The Beasts of Barsac
The Skull of the Marquis de Sade
The Bogeyman Will Get You
Frozen Fear
The Tunnel of Love
The Unspeakable Betrothal
Tell Your Fortune
The Head Man
The Shadow from the Steeple
The Man Who Collected Poe
Lucy Comes To Stay
The Thinking Cap
Constant Reader
The Pin
The Goddess of Wisdom
The Past Master
Where the Buffalo Roam
I Like Blondes
You Got To Have Brains
A Good Imagination
Dead-End Doctor
Terror in the Night
All on a Golden Afternoon
Founding Fathers
String of Pearls
Acknowledgements
1
C
OLIN HAD BEEN MAKING
the little clay figures for a long time before he noticed that they moved. He had been making them for years there in his room, using hundreds of pounds of clay, a little at a time.
The doctors thought he was crazy; Doctor Starr in particular, but then Doctor Starr was a quack and a fool. He couldn't understand why Colin didn't go into the workshop with the other men and weave baskets, or make rattan chairs. That was useful "occupational therapy," not foolishness like sitting around and modeling little clay figures year in and year out. Doctor Starr always talked like that, and sometimes Colin longed to smash his smug, fat face. "Doctor" indeed!
Colin knew what he was doing. He had been a doctor once: Doctor Edgar Colin, surgeon —and brain surgeon at that. He had been a renowned specialist, an authority, in the days when young Starr was a bungling, nervous interne. What irony! Now Colin was shut up in a madhouse, and Doctor Starr was his keeper. It was a grim joke. But mad though he was, Colin knew more about psychopathology than Starr would ever learn.
Colin had gone up with the Red Cross base at Ypres; he had come down miraculously unmangled, but his nerves were shot. For months after that final blinding flash of shells Colin had lain in a coma at the hospital, and when he had recovered they said he had
dementia praecox
. So they sent him here, to Starr.
Colin asked for clay the moment he was up and around. He wanted to work. The long, lean hands, skilled in delicate cranial surgery, had not lost their cunning —their cunning that was like a hunger for still more difficult tasks. Colin knew he would never operate again; he wasn't Doctor Colin any more, but a psychotic patient. Still he had to work. Knowing what he did about mental disorders, his mind was tortured by introspection unless he kept busy. Modeling was the way out.
As a surgeon he had often made casts, busts, anatomical figures copied from life to aid his work. It had been an engrossing hobby, and he knew the organs, even the complicated structure of the nervous system, quite perfectly. Now he worked in clay. He started out making ordinary little figures in his room. Tiny mannikins, five or six inches high, were moulded accurately from memory. He discovered an immediate knack for sculpture, a natural talent to which his delicate fingers responded.
Starr had encouraged him at first. His coma ended, his stupor over, he had been revivified by this new-found interest. His early clay figures gained a great deal of attention and praise. His family sent him funds; he bought instruments for modeling. On the table in his room he soon placed all the tools of a sculptor. It was good to handle instruments again; not knives and scalpels, but things equally wonderful: things that cut and carved and reformed bodies. Bodies of clay, bodies of flesh —what did it matter?
It hadn't mattered at first, but then it did. Colin, after months of painstaking effort, grew dissatisfied. He toiled eight, ten, twelve hours a day, but he was not pleased—he threw away his finished figures, crumpled them into brown balls which he hurled to the floor with disgust. His work wasn't good enough.
The men and women looked like men and women in miniature. They had muscles, tendons, features, even epidermal layers and tiny hairs Colin placed on their small bodies. But what good was it? A fraud, a sham. Inside they were solid clay, nothing more—and that was wrong. Colin wanted to make complete miniature mortals, and for that he must study.
It was then that he had his first clash with Doctor Starr, when he asked for anatomy books. Starr laughed at him, but he managed to get permission.
So Colin learned to duplicate the bony structure of man, the organs, the quite intricate mass of arteries and veins. Finally, the terrific triumph of learning glands, nerve structure, nerve endings. It took years, during which Colin made and destroyed a thousand clay figures. He made clay skeletons, placed clay organs in tiny bodies. Delicate, precise work. Mad work, but it kept him from thinking. He got so he could duplicate the forms with his eyes closed.
At last he assembled his knowledge, made clay skeletons and put the organs in them, then allowed for pinpricked nervous system, blood vessels, glandular organization, dermic structure, muscular tissue —everything. And at last he started making brains. He learned every convolution of the cerebrum and cerebellum; every nerve ending, every wrinkle in the gray matter of the cortex. Study, study, disregard the laughter, disregard the thoughts, disregard the monotony of long years imprisoned; study, study, make the perfect figures, be the greatest sculptor in the world, be the greatest surgeon in the world, be a creator.
Doctor Starr dropped in every so often and subtly tried to discourage such fanatical absorption. Colin wanted to laugh in his face. Starr was afraid this work was driving Colin madder than ever. Colin knew it was the one thing that kept him sane.
Because lately, when he wasn't working, Colin felt things happen to him. The shells seemed to explode in his head again, and they were doing things to his brain —making it come apart, unravel like a ball of twine. He was disorganizing. At times he seemed no longer a person but a thousand persons, and not one body, but a thousand distinct and separate structures, as in the clay men. He was not a unified human being, but a heart, a lung, a liver, a bloodstream, a hand, a leg, a head —all distinct, all growing more and more disassociated as time went on. His brain and body were no longer an entity. Everything within him was falling apart, leading a life of its own. Nerves no longer coordinated with blood. Arm didn't always follow leg. He recalled his medical training, the hints that each bodily organ lived an individual life.
Each cell was a unit, for that matter. When death came, you didn't die all at once. Some organs died before others, some cells went first. But it shouldn't happen in life. Yet it did. That shell shock, whatever it was, had resulted in a slow unraveling. And at night Colin would lie and toss, wondering how soon his body would fall apart—actually fall apart into twitching hands and throbbing heart and wheezing lungs; separated like the fragments torn from a spoiled clay doll.
He had to work to keep sane. Once or twice he tried to explain to Doctor Starr what was happening, to ask for special observation—not for his sake, but because perhaps science might learn something from data on his case. Starr had laughed, as usual. As long as Colin was healthy, exhibited no morbid or homicidal traits, he wouldn't interfere. Fool!
Colin worked. Now he was building bodies—real bodies. It took days to make one; days to finish a form complete with chiseled lips, delicate aural and optical structures correct, tiny fingers and toenails perfectly fitted. But it kept him going. It was fascinating to see a table full of little miniature men and women!
Doctor Starr didn't think so. One afternoon he came in and saw Colin bending over three little lumps of clay with his tiny knives, a book open before him.
"What are you doing there?" he asked.
"Making the brains for my men," Colin answered.
"Brains? Good God!" Starr stooped.
Yes, they
were
brains! Tiny, perfect reproductions of the human brain, perfect in every detail, built up layer on layer with unconnected nerve endings, blood vessels to attach them in craniums of clay!
"What—" Starr exclaimed.
"Don't interrupt. I'm putting in the thoughts," Colin said.
Thoughts? That was sheer madness, beyond madness. Starr stared aghast. Thoughts in brains for clay men?
Starr wanted to say something then. But Colin looked up and the afternoon sun streamed into his face so that Starr could see his eyes. And Starr crept out quietly under that stare; that stare which was almost--
godlike
. The next day Colin noticed that the clay men moved.