THE M.D. A Horror Story Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  BOOK ONE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  BOOK TWO 14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  BOOK THREE 28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  BOOK FOUR 40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  BOOK FIVE 55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  EPILOGUE

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE M.D.

  A Horror Story

  Thomas M. Disch

  For Phil and Betsy Pochoda

  The young murderer doesn’t come from a typical American family. The average American parent doesn’t need to fear being murdered.

  —Dr. Elissa P. Benedek,

  as quoted in “Children Who Kill,”

  New York Times, Oct. 11, 1983

  BOOK ONE

  1

  On the Friday before Christmas vacation Sister Mary Symphorosa informed the kindergarten class at Our Lady of Mercy School that there was no Santa Claus, that the presents you found beside the Christmas tree on Christmas morning were from your parents, and that it was pagan and impious nonsense and a sin against the First Commandment to think otherwise. She made the same announcement every year, and at least one of the children could always be counted on to have a temper tantrum or otherwise show defiance. This year it was Billy Michaels, generally such a quiet child, who threw himself on the floor and lay on his back screaming and thrashing about and generally calling attention to himself.

  Sister Symphorosa looked on, fingering the large wooden crucifix that anchored her rosary beads to her full skirts. She was not particularly alarmed. She even took a professional satisfaction in the boy’s hysterical behavior, as an exorcist might in having driven out a devil. She considered this annual ritual of disillusionment a duty imposed upon her as a defender of the faith. Children ought not to be brought up to believe in something they will necessarily discover to be untrue, an experience that can only blight the budding leaves of a true religious faith. The myth of Santa Claus was, as she had just explained to the children, a pagan practice, and therefore sinful, all the more because it had attached itself to a Christian holy day. She walked decisively to the back of the room, hauled the boy up by his shirt collar, and plopped him down into his seat. He let out a final yelp of protest, and she slapped his face soundly. “Enough of that.”

  He caught his breath and glared at her.

  Before he could renew his foolishness, Sister Symphorosa turned her back on him and continued talking to the children as though nothing unusual had happened. “Now, who can tell me what the First Commandment instructs us to do?”

  No hands went up. Sister Symphorosa had shifted gears too fast for them. Everything that she had told them in the last two weeks about Moses and the Golden Calf and the Ten Commandments had vanished from their erratic memories. Hints were of no help.

  “The First Commandment,” Sister Symphorosa announced, in the tone of another Moses reproaching the tribes of Israel, “is ‘I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no strange gods before thee.’ And what is this Santa Claus but a strange god? He can fly all about the world in a magic sleigh with flying reindeer. He is supposed to know if you’re good or bad—”

  Billy Michaels produced an audible gurgling sound, as though he were being strangled—or getting ready to throw another tantrum.

  “Billy Michaels, be quiet and sit still. Only God, who is omniscient, knows that. Only God knows the secrets we each have in our hearts. God knows that, because God knows everything, but Santa Claus can’t know anything, because Santa Claus does not exist, and never did, though there was a St. Nicholas once. But he did not live at the North Pole. No one lives there, it is much too cold. The real St. Nicholas lived in a town called Myra, where he was a bishop like our own dear Bishop Fitzgerald, and his feast day is the sixth of December.”

  There was a long silence. Sister Symphorosa surveyed the rows and files of wide-eyed faces, searching them for signs of defiance or inattention. They all seemed satisfactorily subdued.

  “St. Nicholas,” she resumed in a cheerier tone, “is the patron saint of children and of storekeepers, and that must be how the legends of Santa Claus got started.” She broke off as she did not want to take the children out of their depth. Enough to smash the idol; she did not need to write its history.

  “When you go home from school today, children, I want you to tell your parents that you understand that there is no Santa Claus. Tell them that and then thank them for all the lovely presents they gave you when they were pretending to be Santa. And tell them they don’t have to pretend anymore. And if you have any little brothers or sisters who believe in Santa Claus you must tell them too, because it is a sin against the First Commandment to worship gods that don’t exist. Do you all understand?”

  Some children nodded, and there were a few whispery Yes, Sisters. But Billy Michaels didn’t move a muscle.

  “Billy,” Sister Symphorosa insisted, “do you understand?”

  The boy gave no sign that he had heard her.

  “Billy,” she said in a tone of patient instruction such as one might use in teaching a parrot speech, “I am talking to you. I asked you a question.”

  Reluctantly, the boy’s eyes turned toward her. There was fear in his look, but defiance still smoldered in his contumacious little heart. She felt an impulse to strike him again, but checked it. An obstinate spirit demands correction, but she must be more judicious in the administration of corporal punishment, since she had twice already been called to task by Sister Fidelis, the principal of OLM, for what the younger nun regarded as excessive severity. Sister Fidelis was too easily cowed by interfering parents. But she was the principal, and Sister Symphorosa was bound by her vow of obedience. Unless the boy offered provocation, she must deal with him tenderly.

  “And you understand now, don’t you, Billy, that there is no Santa Claus?”

  “I saw him,” Billy said.

  “You saw a picture of him,” Sister Symphorosa said.

  “No, he was alive. And he looked just like he does in his pictures. He was fat and he had a red suit and a bag full of presents.”

  “Then you saw someone dressed up to look like Santa Claus. Many busines
ses pay money to bums they find on the streets so they will pretend to be Santa Claus. But they are only old bums. And that’s what you saw.”

  “No,” said Billy, “I saw him come down the chimney. He wasn’t the Santa’s helper at Dayton’s, I’ve seen him too. This was the real Santa Claus.”

  There was a giggle from the front of the classroom. Many of the children already understood that there was no Santa. Indeed, Sister Symphorosa sometimes speculated that the deceit of Santa Claus was one that children practiced on their parents rather than the other way round, that they all understood the practical impossibility of flying reindeer and of Santa’s simultaneous appearance on a global basis, but that they knew they’d get more presents if they went along with the whole charade. This was a possibility she found extremely angering.

  “William,” she said quite sternly, “you must not tell lies.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Sister Symphorosa bit her lip. In the face of such obstinacy the only proper course was to administer corporal punishment. But since the boy was now behaving sedately she must restrain herself. Let Sister Fidelis solve the problem, if she could, with her liberal principles!

  Sister Symphorosa wrote out a note to Sister Fidelis, folded it, and handed it to the Michaels boy. “I want you to take this note to the principal. Do you know where her office is?”

  The boy nodded.

  “You tell Sister Fidelis what you told me, and if she agrees that you saw Santa Claus come down the chimney, then she will give you a note to me saying that you are not a liar. But if she does not, then you will have to apologize to me and to the entire class for wasting our time with such ridiculous nonsense. And you will not be allowed back into my class without either that note or an apology. Because I cannot tolerate liars.”

  When he was out of the room, Sister Symphorosa, as a kind of reward to the rest of the class, told them the true story of St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, how he’d miraculously brought back to life three rich youths whom a wicked innkeeper had murdered, dismembered, and hidden in a salting tub.

  “And that,” Sister Symphorosa said, rounding off the wonderful tale with a lesson, “is why St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children, and why we still pray to him to be protected from robbers and thieves. But he is not Santa Claus. I hope that is clear. Now, are there any questions?”

  The Burdon girl raised her hand.

  “Yes, Sally?”

  “Sister, what is a salting tub?”

  “A salting tub, Sally, is what butchers used to use in the olden days to keep meat from turning bad. When meat isn’t properly preserved, it rots and gets worms in it. But if we put meat into a tub of salty water, it won’t go bad. Of course, that was in the days before refrigerators and deep freezes. If St. Nicholas had lived today, he would very likely have found the bodies of the three rich youths in a deep freeze. Are there any other questions?”

  There were no more questions, so Sister Symphorosa used the rest of the afternoon to teach the children to sing Christmas carols. They sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” and then “Adeste Fideles,” “Silent Night,” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” Then she let them make requests. One of them asked for “Jingle Bells,” but no one suggested a song about Santa Claus.

  She dismissed the class with a sense that she had done a good day’s work.

  Then she remembered the Michaels boy. He had not yet returned from the principal’s office. It would not do to go running after him. That would only make him feel more self-important. She took her rosary from the drawer of her desk, kissed the silver crucifix, and made the sign of the cross: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  Then she pondered the first Joyful Mystery, which is the Annunciation.

  2

  At a little after four o’clock, just as “General Hospital” had come to its suspenseful Friday afternoon climax, the smoke alarm in the kitchen went off, and then, before old Mrs. Obstschmecker had quite figured out what was happening, the phone started ringing. She picked up the phone, said “Hello?” and only then realized that the alarm was still ringing and that there was black smoke coming out of the doorway to the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t talk now. Something is burning.” She set the receiver down on a stack of clothes to be ironed on the dining room table and hurried into the kitchen, where, as she’d already guessed, the percolator on the back coil was giving off a steady stream of smoke. It was also producing a stench of burning Bakelite, but old Mrs. Obstschmecker had a poor sense of smell, which is how the burning coffeepot had gone so long undetected.

  “Oh dear,” she fretted aloud, as she plunged the semimolten bottom of the pot into the pan of rinse water, to spectacular effect, “Madge is going to be furious.” For a variety of reasons, real and imagined, Mrs. Obstschmecker lived in terror of her daughter Madge and did not want to give her cause for anger or even complaint. Madge was sure to interpret the ruined coffeepot as another sign of her mother’s slipping memory, and Mrs. Obstschmecker was certain that all such signs were being set down in some mental ledger book Madge kept against the day that Mrs. Obstschmecker was to be shipped off to some nursing home. Madge had worked at nursing homes and she knew what they were like, and even so she was beginning to throw out hints. A nursing home! Mrs. Obstschmecker would as soon have gone to prison!

  Open the windows, that’s what she must do. Open the windows and air out the room. She got two of the kitchen windows open, but the third stuck. All the while, the smoke alarm went on ringing, making it impossible to concentrate on anything else. Mrs. Obstschmecker did not want to risk standing on a chair, so she took up a copy of the Pioneer Press from the kitchen table and used it as a fan to fan away the smoke from around the alarm. As her arms rose and fell, the dewlaps pendant from her upper arms waggled and her well-buoyed bosom heaved. “Stop it,” she commanded the alarm. “Stop it right now.”

  And it did. The very instant she told it to, the alarm stopped ringing. “Well,” she said, “thank goodness.”

  She noticed the back coil of the stove still glowing red and realized she hadn’t turned it off. She did that now. There were blobs and dribbles of the melted coffeepot sticking to the red-hot coil. It was going to be impossible to clean the coffeepot. She would have to buy a new one and hope Madge wouldn’t notice. Ned could go out and buy it for her when he got home from school. Which he should be already. Both children were always home by the end of “General Hospital.” Unless Ned had to stay for choir practice, and on the last day before Christmas vacation that was possible. But Billy should have got home by now.

  “Billy?” she called out. She went into the dining room and called again, and then again at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Obstschmecker felt more exasperated than worried. The child knew his way home from school, and if he’d stopped at a friend’s house after school to watch the cartoons he was forbidden to watch here at home (they seemed to give him nightmares, at least according to Madge), so much the better. It meant that he had such a thing as a friend.

  Such an impossible child! Mrs. Obstschmecker hadn’t been at all surprised when the sister had called up a month ago to complain to Madge that the boy refused to take a nap at the prescribed kindergarten naptime of two o’clock. “I believe,” the sister had said, “that this boy is possessed by a devil!” Madge didn’t know, and had not thought to ask, whether she’d meant it literally or just as a way of talking. Madge wasn’t very religious. Mrs. Obstschmecker believed that too much religion was bad for teaching discipline, since when children started thinking too much about what was right and what was wrong, they tended to get rebellious and to question the rules their parents laid down for them. Now, though, she had to wonder whether it might not have been a better idea to bring Madge up a really solid Catholic, like Mrs. Wolfgren’s daughter Karen, who was such a model of devotion to her poor bedridden mother. You couldn’t help envying someone with a daughter like Karen.

  Mrs. Obstschmecker
returned to the kitchen to see if the air had cleared enough to close the windows. The second window proved balky, and before she could get it unstuck, the doorbell rang. As she passed through the dining room to answer it, she noticed the phone receiver lying on the ironing. She picked it up and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now,” and returned it to its cradle. The doorbell rang again. “I’m coming. I’m coming. Hold your horses.”

  She tugged the heavy wooden door open, and, seeing the visitor to be a woman, unlatched the storm door of aluminum and hazily transparent plastic. She opened the outer door, and gaped. “Sondra,” she said with belated recognition.

  “Is Billy home?” Sondra asked, Sondra was now Sondra Winckelmeyer, but once she’d been Sondra Michaels. She was Billy’s mother.

  “What? No. Not yet.”

  “Has the school called?”

  “What? No. No one’s called.”

  “I tried to call,” Sondra said, pushing her way past Mrs. Obstschmecker into the hall, “but the line’s been busy for the last half hour.”

  “I’ve been here,” Mrs. Obstschmecker said defensively, “every minute.” She noticed, closing the door, that there was a fine dusting of new snow on the steps up to the porch and on the sidewalk beyond. It was so nearly dark that the streetlights were on, those gruesome yellow phosphorous lights that had replaced the nice old-fashioned kind up and down the entire length of Calumet.

  “Do you know where Billy is?” Sondra insisted. She’d already taken off her coat and thrown it over the platform rocker. The collar of the coat was silver fox.

  “No. But he must be on his way home by now.”

  “And Edward?”

  “Edward? Oh, you mean Ned. He’s probably at choir practice. He’ll be singing a solo in the Nativity Pageant this year. Is there something wrong?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out. If your phone is working, I’d like to call the school and find out if they’ve found him yet.”