The little doctor stumbled and nearly fell down. His mind jumped through time. When studying at the Ecole de Medecine in Paris, young Holmes had seen the combats des animaux, a barbaric exhibition of bulldogs fighting each other, then being turned loose on a wolf, a bear, a wild boar, a bull, and a jackass tied to a post. Holmes knew even during the audacity of youth that he could never quite get the iron of Calvinism out of his soul, no matter how much poetry he wrote. There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law. For his forefathers, the great mystery of life was this sin; for Dr. Holmes, it was suffering. He would have never expected to find so much of it. The dark memory, the inhuman cheers and laughter, stampeded into Holmes’s dazed mind now as he looked ahead.
From the center of the room, hanging on a hook meant for storing bags of salt or some similarly pouched supplies, a face stared at him. Or, more accurately, it had been a face. The nose was sliced away cleanly, all the way from the bridge to the mustached lip, causing the skin to fold over. One of the man’s ears dangled deciduously from the side of the face, low enough, indeed, to brush against the rigidly arched shoulder. Both cheeks were sliced in such a manner that the jaw dropped to a permanent position of openness, as if speech might come at any moment; but instead, blood poured black from his mouth. A straight line of blood was drawn between the heavily indented chin and the reproductive organ of the man—and this organ, the only remaining confirmation of the monstrosity’s gender, was itself split horribly in half, a dissection inconceivable even to the doctor. Muscles, nerves, and blood vessels unfolded themselves in unvarying anatomical harmony and baffling disorder. The body’s arms hung helplessly at his sides, ending in dark pulps wrapped in flooded tourniquets. There were no hands.
It was a moment before Holmes realized he had seen the decimated face before and another moment still until he recognized the mangled victim, from the pronounced dimple doggedly remaining on his chin. Oh no. The interval between the two conscious moments was an annihilation.
Holmes took a step back, his shoe gliding through the vomit that had been deposited by the first discoverer of the scene, a vagrant looking for shelter. Holmes twisted himself into a nearby chair, positioned as though for the purpose of observing all this. He wheezed uncontrollably and did not notice that to the side of his feet was a vest of a distractingly bright color neatly folded atop hand-tailored white pants and, on the floor, scattered scraps of paper.
He heard his name spoken. Patrolman Rey stood nearby. Even the air in the room seemed to tremble, to push the whole arrangement upside down.
Holmes tumbled to his feet and shook his head dizzily at Rey.
A plainclothes detective, broad-shouldered and with a strong beard, marched over to Rey and began yelling that he did not belong there. Then Chief Kurtz intervened and pulled the detective away.
The doctor’s nauseated wheezing spell left him standing in a place closer to the twisted carnage than he would have wished, but before he could think to move away, he felt his arm brushed by something wet. It felt like a hand, but in fact it was a bloody, tourniqueted stump. Yet Holmes had not moved an inch—he was sure of that. He was too shocked to move. He felt as if he were in that type of nightmare where one can only pray to himself that he is dreaming.
“Heaven help us, it’s alive!” screamed the detective, running off, his voice strangled by his tight hold on a rising flood from his stomach. Chief Kurtz, too, disappeared, shouting.
As Holmes spun around, he looked directly into the blankly bulging eyes of the maimed, naked body of Phineas Jennison and watched the wretched limbs flail and jerk through the air. It was only a moment, really—only a fraction of a tithe of a hundredth of a second—until the body stopped cold, never to move again, yet Holmes never doubted what he had just witnessed. The doctor stood corpselike, his little mouth dry and twitching, his eyes blinking uncontrollably with unwanted moisture, and his fingers wriggling desperately. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes knew that Phineas Jennison’s movement had not been the voluntary motions of a living being, the willed actions of a sentient man. They were the delayed, mindless convulsions of unspeakable death. But this knowledge made it no better.
The dead touch having left his blood cold, Holmes was hardly conscious of drifting back over the harbor water or of the police carriage, called Black Maria, in which they rode alongside the body of Jennison to the medical college, where it was explained to him that Barnicoat, the medical examiner, had taken to bed with a terrible pneumonia in a fight for a higher salary and Professor Haywood could not at present be located. Holmes nodded as though he were listening. Haywood’s student assistant volunteered to assist Dr. Holmes in an autopsy. Holmes barely registered these urgent exchanges, he could barely feel his hands cut into the already impossibly shredded body in a dark upper chamber of the medical college.
“Observe in me the contrapasso.”
Holmes’s head snapped up as if a child had just cried for help. Reynolds, the student assistant, looked back, as did Rey and Kurtz and two other officers who had entered the room unnoticed by Holmes. Holmes looked again at Phineas Jennison, his mouth hanging open by the cut jaw.
“Dr. Holmes?” the student assistant said. “All right, are you?”
Just a burst of imagination, the voice he had heard, the whisper, the command. But Holmes’s hands trembled too much even to carve a turkey, and he had to leave the remainder of the operation to Haywood’s assistant as he excused himself. Holmes wandered into an alleyway off Grove Street, gathering his breath in bits and spurts. He heard someone approach him. Rey backed the doctor farther into the alleyway.
“Please, I can’t speak at the moment,” Holmes said, his eyes fixed down.
“Who butchered Phineas Jennison?”
“How should I know!” Holmes cried. He lost his balance, inebriated with the mangled visions in his head.
“Translate this for me, Dr. Holmes.” Rey pried open Holmes’s hand and placed a notepaper there.
“Please, Patrolman Rey. We’ve already…” Holmes’s hands shook violently as he fumbled with the paper.
“ ‘Because I parted persons so united,’ “ Rey recited from what he had heard the night before, “ ‘I now bear my brain parted. Thus observe in me the contrapasso.’ That is what we just saw, isn’t it? How do you translate contrapasso, Dr. Holmes? A countersuffering?”
“There’s no exact… how did you…” Holmes pulled off his silk cravat and tried to breathe into the neck cloth. “I don’t know anything.”
Rey continued: “You read of this murder in a poem. You saw it before it happened and did nothing to prevent it.”
“No! We did all we could. We tried. Please, Patrolman Rey, I can’t…”
“Do you know this man?” Rey removed the newspaper engraving of Grifone Lonza from his pocket and handed it to the doctor. “He jumped from the window at the police station.”
“Please!” Holmes was suffocating. “No more! Go away now!”
“Hey there!” Three medical college students, the rustic type Holmes referred to as his young barbarians, were passing the alleyway relishing cheap cigars. “You, moke! Get away from Professor Holmes!”
Holmes tried to call out to them, but nothing made it out of the clutter in his throat.
The swiftest barbarian collided into Rey with a fist aimed at the officer’s stomach. Rey grabbed the boy’s other arm and threw him down as softly as possible. The other two pounced on Rey just as Holmes’s voice returned. “No! No, boys! Be still! Get away from here at once! This is a friend! Scat!” They slid away meekly.