“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.”