Chapter 9 - Timotheee Gargantuan, Part II

The lecture auditorium is packed. The buzzing and grunting of a thousand black tongues fills the space like a humming hive of insects. On the darkened stage, the lectern stands empty, framed by moldering red curtains. An easel has been erected next to the lectern, and upon it sits a white poster with loping hand-written words.

Doctor Thadwick Sciaticus, MD, Neurosurgery

presents

GRAND ROUNDS

“Icepicks for the Wicked: A randomized control study regarding prefrontal cortex skullduggery in the morally insane.”

Near the back of the auditorium, Timotheee Gargantuan has found a space large enough for his bulky corpse. He sits on the cushioned flesh of his large rump and folds his hands quietly across his chest. He’s excited, of course, to hear the legendary Doctor Sciaticus speak. The entire hospital has been abuzz with anticipation for this talk.

But there’s another reason his heart is fluttering today. Sitting next to him is Nurse Wretched, looking particularly svelte and beautiful in her pressed white uniform. She’s wearing a blue widowvine over her right ear, and its sapphire petals sparkle like a jewel against the alabaster surface of her skull. It’s a small touch, unusually decorative for the nurse. He likes to think it’s for his sake, but for all he knows, she could be trying to impress Doctor Sciaticus. She’s spoken quite earnestly about the surgeon in the past.

Nurse Wretched turns and offers Timotheee the smallest smile—that little crinkle in her forehead. It’s enough to make him sweat with ecstasy.

They sit together in silence, staring ahead at the dark auditorium. Eventually, a hushed whisper rolls like a wave through the audience, and the entire room falls into breathless quietude. The Administrative Lich ascends the stage with slow and pompous importance. Its black shawls drag along the wood as it raises its bony arms for silence—though there was no noise to begin with.

The Lich clears its voice and telegraphs its words like a blast of arctic air into the minds of the audience.

FRIENDS LET ME HUMBLY INTRODUCE A SURGEON YOU ALL KNOW—

Timotheee squirms uncomfortably with the rest of the audience as the Lich’s haunting voice scrapes the inside of his skull. The demon’s words dig behind his eardrums like a fiery itch and send frigid shocks down his spine. They burrow into his teeth with a fearsome ache. His mind clouds with visions of fiery chasms and screaming voices; of endless black bogs bubbling with the gas of buried corpses; of titanic monsters with a thousand limbs swimming through the abyssal plains. He can see burning cities sundering in clouds of red fireflies; mountains erupting with black flame; stillbirth gods of the cosmos stirring awake, their mouths and minds unhinged.

Timotheee finds himself weeping in horror. The wet, greasy tears roll down his doughy cheeks, and when he glances at Nurse Wretched, he finds her dabbing her own moist eyes with a handkerchief. Someone in the audience lets loose a long, plaintive scream, and this is answered by another primordial howl.

Before the entire room descends into chaos, the Lich finishes its introduction and sweeps an arm to the side. From behind the curtain emerges the portly Doctor Sciaticus. He looks as discombobulated as the entire audience—buried deep in the sibylline nightmare of the Lich’s spell. His exact facial expression is difficult to discern, of course, because Sciaticus has no mouth or lips. He speaks like many of his fellow surgeons: through a gaping hole in the throat. This is, of course, a self-induced injury, as the surgeons would otherwise be entirely mute and unwilling to speak to anyone.

“Ah, er, um, thank you, Administrator, for that warm introduction,” the doctor begins, grasping the podium to steady himself. “Let’s have a round of applause for the Lich!”

A stunned smattering of claps echoes across the room. In that interim, Doctor Sciaticus appears to take control of himself. He straightens his back and shakes his head once, twice. Then he begins to speak in a clearer tone.

“Friends, I am Thadwick Sciaticus, medical director of skullduggery at the House of God. It has been my privilege to serve here for ten thousand years, to witness the evolution and arrival of the human species we now care for. There have been plenty of challenges, certainly…” He pauses as the audience chuckles sympathetically. “We all know that humans are vile, fickle, and murderous subjects. Our duty of reforming these creatures—of mending their broken minds—is a sacred one entrusted to us by the Eldritch Lords. We will not turn our back on these responsibilities. As the old saying goes, “All who are sick...”

“…must be made well,” the crowd murmurs in unison.

“Right! And so…” Doctor Sciaticus turns around and removes the cover sheet from the poster behind the lectern. An identical white board is hidden beneath, but this one is covered with figures. Timotheee strains to see what’s written there, but his eyesight is quite poor. Meanwhile, Sciaticus has drawn a long, extendible pointer from his jacket and raps on the poster like a professor at the chalkboard.

“What we have here is a breakdown of my latest research. This, of course, is the randomized control study regarding icepick skullduggery for the Morally Insane. If you’ll humor me, there are some important statistics I’d like to share.” He clears his throat with the sound of an impacted car engine. “There are approximately ten million new patients interred to the House of God every year. Of these, nearly half suffer from psychotic tendencies and murderous impulses. We know this because they have committed acts of wanton violence in their previous lives—rape, infanticide, and so on and so forth.”

He pauses to lower the poster and reveal another behind it. This image shows a black box being lowered into a pit. “The standard of care for the past five thousand years has been sensory strangulation,” he continues, tapping the poster. “In other words, the patient is placed in a soundproof metal box and lowered to three thousand meters underwater. They are left there in a vacuum of sound and light until their minds shatter. It is a fairly effective and foolproof method of erasing psychoses. In fact, the cure rate for murderous psychosis is nearly 89% in these individuals, with a 95% confidence interval, in the last meta-analysis done by the Committee of Reform.

“But let’s not kid ourselves, my friends,” he adds with a chuckle. “There are obvious problems with this methodology. For starters, submersion takes a variable amount of time—anywhere from 50 to 100 years, on average—to ensure total permanent dissociation. This begs the question: how long do we leave them down there? And what if we forget where we put them? Then, of course, we have the issue of the Leviathan. We all know the Leviathan likes to feed on our patients before His winter hibernation. How do we account for the Leviathan eating thousands of boxes every year? As you can imagine, these are difficult confounding variables.”

He pauses again, producing a new poster. On this one, an image of an icepick is seen piercing through the eye socket of a startled-looking woman and poking into her brain. Doctor Sciaticus gestures at the icepick with his pointer.

“I scoured the medical literature, searching for an alternative method to dissociate the psychopathic brain. What I discovered only recently was a technique pioneered by the human race! Can you imagine? Yes, I see you all tittering in the audience, but we must not let our hubris stand in the way of science. Even the humans are capable of surprising us.” Sciaticus nods and strokes his chin with his long arachnodactyly fingers. “Indeed, I read earnestly about their prefrontal lobotomy. It’s quite brilliant, the concept. Imagine scrambling the frontal cortex of the brain, jarring up those emotional impulses and executive functions. Obsessions, compulsions, wild temperaments—all within our grasp. We need only to insert the orbitoclast through the eye socket, through the frontal or sphenoid bone, into the white matter of the frontal cortex. Then, of course, we must wiggle it carefully. By my estimates, six wiggles to the right and six wiggles to the left should do the trick. This allows us to sever the white matter fibers in the internal capsule…”

Timotheee suddenly feels a warm breath on his neck. He wants to crane his head, but of course he’s too fat to do this while sitting. But he recognizes the earth-like scent wafting in his nose.

“Are you following all this?” Nurse Wretched whispers, her mouth just inches from his ear.

“He lost me at orbitoclast,” Timotheee says in a hushed tone.

“He’s very impressive, don’t you agree?”

Timotheee nods. “Yes. For a brain surgeon, he’s a head above the rest.” He waits until he hears her scratchy laughter in the darkness, and then he beams at his own silly joke.

“You’re corny,” she says, a little too loudly. Their neighbors turn and glare at them. Timotheee apologizes and bites his lower lip, but a great, wrenching laugh bubbles out of him. More angry faces glower at them.

Meanwhile, on stage, the doctor is plowing on with his lecture, seemingly lost in the sound of his own voice. “…in this study, we compared one thousand patients who underwent lobotomy to one thousand patients in sensory strangulation. The primary outcome was impulse to murder, as measured on the Kreigler Murder Index, in a one month period following the procedure…”

“Timotheee,” Nurse Wretched says suddenly. Her bony hand rests on his arm, setting his heart fluttering.

“Yes?”

“I’m enjoying this.”

“You are?”

“Yes. Being here with you. It’s fun, don’t you think? Exciting.”

His rubbery lips peel back in a gentle smile. He wants to turn to look at her—he wants to never stop looking at her—but again, it’s physically impossible for him to do this while sitting. His neck simply doesn’t work horizontally like that.

Instead, he licks his lips and asks, “Do you want to come outside with me, after the lecture? We could take a walk through—”

“For the love of Hell, shut up!” An exasperated physician sitting in the audience ahead of them has twisted around, all his fanged teeth barred.

Timotheee bows his head apologetically. He feels Nurse Wretched’s hand tighten on his arm; she’s shaking with silent laughter. After a long moment, she leans as close as she ever has to his head and whispers with her sweet grave-soil breath, “Yes.”

A surge of elation sweeps through him. Her one simple word is a soaring validation of what he’s known in his heart for months. Yet he dares not whisper it aloud, not even to himself.

Up on stage, Doctor Sciaticus is introducing a special guest, the pioneer of his original study, one Harold Bartholomew Crump. “This is Bartleby the Clown!” the doctor announces to the crowd. “My first honored patient. Tell us, how do you feel after the skullduggery, Bartleby?”

The clown is a slobbish looking man of advanced middle age, with glassy eyes and drooling lips. He opens his mouth and saliva spills onto his shirt. “Gooooooood,” he says slowly. Very slowly.

“And do you still want to carve out the hearts of children?” Sciaticus inquires.

“Nooooo,” Bartleby replies. “Bun—NEEEEES bad. Bunnies baaaaad.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the doctor says grandly. “This man is cured!”

The audience explodes into applause. Thunderous, exuberant accolades. Those with mouths begin to hoot and holler. Others whistle, if they have lips to do so. Many simply scream. Sciaticus bows elegantly at the waist. His presentation seemingly concluded, the audience rises to its feet to continue applauding.

But Timotheee and Nurse Wretched are no longer present to witness this triumph of medicine. They’ve eloped out the back door, heading for the garden.

*

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