Fredric Brown - Homicide Sanitarium

"Nope," said Doc. "But if he's a local resident, somebody will. We'll have a lot of curiosity seekers in here tomorrow. Always get them after a violent death."

Bill Drager said he was going home and went out. His shift was over. He had just dropped in on his own time.

I stood around and watched the chess game for a few minutes. Mr. Paton was getting licked this time. He was two pieces down and on the defensive. Only a miracle could save him.

Then Doc moved a knight and said, "Check," and it was all over but the shouting. Mr. Paton could move out of check all right, but the knight had forked his king and queen, and with the queen gone, as it would be after the next move, the situation was hopeless.

"You got me, Dwight," he said. "I'll resign. My mind must be fuzzy tonight.

Didn't see that knight coming."

"Shall we start another game? It's early."

"You'd beat me. Let's bowl a quick game, instead, and get home early."

After they left, I finished up my work on the card file and then did my trigonometry. It was almost midnight then. I remembered the man who had phoned that he was coming in and decided he had changed his mind. Probably his brother had arrived home safely, after all.

I went downstairs to be sure the refrigerating unit was okay. Finding that it was, I came back up and locked the door again. Then I went out into the hall and locked the outer door. It's sup-posed to be kept locked, too, and I really should have locked it earlier.

After that, I read The Golden Bough, with a note-book in front of me so I could jot down anything I found that would fit into my thesis.

I must have become deeply engrossed in my reading because when the night bell rang, I jumped inches out of my chair. I looked at the clock and saw it was two in the morning.

Ordinarily, I don't mind the place where I work at all. Being near dead bodies gives some people the willies, but not me. There isn't any nicer, quieter place for studying and reading than a morgue at night.

But I had a touch of the creeps then. I do get them once in a while. This time it was the result of being startled by the sudden ringing of that bell when I was so interested in something that I had forgotten where I was and why I was there.

I put down the book and went out into the long dark hallway. When I had put on the hall light, I felt a little better. I could see somebody standing outside the glass-paned door at the end of the hall. A tall thin man whom I didn't know. He wore glasses and was carrying a gold-headed cane.

"My name is Burke, Roger Burke," he said when I opened the door. "I phoned early this evening about my brother being missing. Uh--may I--"

"Of course," I told him. "Come this way. When you didn't come for so long, I thought you had located your brother."

"I thought I had," he said hesitantly. "A friend said he had seen him this evening, and I quit worrying for a while. But when it got after one o'clock and he wasn't home, I--"

We had reached the coroner's office by then, but I stopped and turned.

"There's only one unidentified body here," I told him, "and that was brought in this afternoon. If your brother was seen this evening, it couldn't be him."

The tall man said, "Oh," rather blankly and looked at me a moment. Then he said, "I hope that's right. But this friend said he saw him at a distance, on a crowded street. He could have been mistaken. So as long as I'm here--"

"I guess you might as well," I said, "now that you're here. Then you'll be sure."

I led the way through the office and unlocked the door.

I was glad, as we started down the stairs, that there seemed little likelihood of identification. I hate to be around when one is made. You always seem to share, vicariously, the emotion, of the person who recognizes a friend or relative.

At the top of the stairs I pushed the button that put on the overhead lights downstairs in the morgue. The switch for the showcase was down below. I stopped to flick it as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and the tall man went on past me toward the case. Apparently he had been a visitor here before.

I had taken only a step or two after him when I heard him gasp. He stopped suddenly and took a step backward so quickly that I bumped into him and grabbed his arm to steady myself.

He turned around, and his face was a dull pasty gray that one seldom sees on the face of a living person.

"My God!" he said. "Why didn't you warn me that--"

It didn't make sense for him to say a thing like that. I've been with people before when they have identified relatives, but none of them had ever reacted just that way. Or had it been merely identification? He certainly looked as though he had seen some-thing horrible.

I stepped a little to one side so that I could see past him. When I saw, it was as though a wave of cold started at the base of my spine and ran up along my body.

I had never seen anything like it--and you get toughened when you work in a morgue.

The glass top of the display case had been broken in at the upper, the head, end, and the body inside the case was--well, I'll try to be as objective about it as I can. The best way to be objective is to put it bluntly. The flesh of the face had been eaten away, eaten away as though acid had been poured on it, or as though --

I got hold of myself and stepped up to the edge of the display case and looked down.

It had not been acid. Acid does not leave the marks of teeth.

Nauseated, I closed my eyes for an instant until I got over it. Behind me, I heard sounds as though the tall man, who had been the first to see it, was being sick.

I didn't blame him.

"I don't--" I said, and stepped back. "Something's happened here."

Silly remark, but you can't think of the right thing to say in a spot like that.

"Come on," I told him. "I'll have to get the police."

The thought of the police steadied me. When the police got here, it would be all right. They would find out what had happened.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs my mind started to work logically again.

I could picture Bill Drager up in the office firing questions at me, asking me, "When did it happen? You can judge by the temperature, can't you?"

The tall man stumbled up the stairs past me as I paused. Most decidedly I didn't want to be down there alone, but I yelled to him:

"Wait up there. I'll be with you in a minute."

He would have to wait, of course, because I would have to unlock the outer door to let him out.

I turned back and looked at the thermometer in the broken case, trying not to look at anything else. It read sixty-three degrees, and that was only about ten degrees under the temperature of the rest of the room.

The glass had been broken, then, for some time. An hour, I'd say offhand, or maybe a little less. Upstairs, with the heavy door closed, I wouldn't have heard it break. Anyway, I hadn't heard it break.

I left the lights on in the morgue, all of them, when I ran up the stairs.

The tall man was standing in the middle of the office, looking around as though he were in a daze. His face still had that grayish tinge, and I was just as glad that I didn't have to look in a mirror just then, because my own face was likely as bad.

I picked up the telephone and found myself giving Bill Drager's home telephone number instead of asking for the police. I don't know why my thoughts ran so strongly to Bill Drager, except that he had been the one who had suspected that something more than met the eye had been behind the hit-run case from the Mill Road.

"Can--will you let me out of here?" the tall man said. "I--I--that wasn't my--"

"I'm afraid not," I told him. "Until the police get here. You--uh--witnessed--"