From ... in Literature — Dec 7, 2024

What’s in a body? – A story with a twist in the tale

The following story is an extract from Dr, Vernon Coleman’s novel ‘Stories with a twist in the tale’. It’s about Tom Whitehouse, a man who works in the subject store at St. Christopher’s Hospital Medical School, preparing bodies for dissection.

It may sound like a boring subject for a story but read on to discover the twist in the tale.

(PS: It’s a novel, not a true story.)

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By Dr. Vernon Coleman

Note: This story was first published in London Mystery Magazine in 1966. It is now included in Vernon Coleman’s book `Stories with a twist in the tale’ which is available via the bookshop on his website under the section ‘Novels’.

Tom Whitehouse gazed admiringly at his new body. The grey skin stretched taut over the tiny frame, the dull glass eyes, the shaven head: it was all so familiar. For over forty years Tom had been in charge of the cadaver or subject store at St Christopher’s Hospital Medical School; during that time, he must have prepared several thousand bodies for dissection. It was his job not only to clean, shave and label his “customers” but also to inject them with preservative.

It was funny really. He had started work at the Medical School as a laboratory assistant straight after leaving school. The old man who had been in charge of the subject store had asked for an assistant and Tom had applied because the pay was better. It was difficult to find people prepared to work anywhere in the mortuary but Tom was hoping to get married. The extra weekly money had enabled him to get married that much earlier than he had dared hope. Looking back now he couldn’t understand what all the rush had been about.

The little old lady stretched out naked and still on the stone table was thin and bony. Still, once they get this far, thought Tom, that was all to the good. The students liked a thin subject to dissect, it made their work so much easier. In fact, thought Tom, Professor Simkins himself might well like to use the new body.

Professor Simkins, of the Department of Anatomy, was writing a new Dissecting Manual for medical students and had spent a good deal of time in recent months dissecting bodies and then having photographs taken to illustrate his new book.

Tom gazed at the little old lady. It seemed a shame really. Although he had worked so long among the dead Tom had never quite managed to adopt the nonchalant attitude towards death which so many people in similar positions displayed. Tom could never forget that his “customers” were someone’s children; they had probably married and may have had children of their own. They had certainly loved and laughed. But once they entered the medical school as subjects, they lost all dignity and respect. They were not so much subjects as objects.

Tom’s assistant, a red-cheeked youth with a sullen scowl, never seemed to have even passed through this stage. To him, the people who entered the preparation room were no more human than the cold stone slabs on which they lay. Tom had not wanted him as an assistant in the first place but he had no say in the matter. Not that Professor Simkins would normally have omitted to consult Tom but the new assistant was a vague relation of the Professor’s, and Tom rather gathered that he had little choice in the matter either.

Normally Tom and the Professor got on well together. Tom was the complete physical opposite of the Professor. The subject store man was short, round and sometimes blustery, bright tiny twinkling eyes sunk deep in a spherical little head, the whole crowned with a few wisps of silver grey hair. Professor Simkins was tall and thin, basically ungainly but sometimes surprisingly regal. Temperamentally, too, they were precisely complementary. Tom sometimes bluff but a cheery fellow at heart. Professor Simkins seemingly impersonal and unfeeling; rather cold in manner, even to those he knew well. Tom admired and respected the Professor who in turn respected Tom and refused to interfere with the daily running of the subject store.

It was twenty minutes to six; Tom pulled a sheet over the little old lady and sighed. It was time to go home for the weekend. As he left, Tom gazed for a moment at the bodies on their cold stone slabs, he nodded to them, called good night and quietly shut the door as if afraid of waking them.

As he hurried homewards, the sickly smell of death and preservatives billowing around him like a swarm of bees, Tom’s face lost its cheerful look and acquired a dreary, contemplative stare; his eyes lost their sparkle and gained a dull, hopeless gaze. He did not look forward to going home. It was ironic, he thought, that marriage, the thing that had induced him to take the job in the subject store all those years ago, should have turned out to be such a miserable anti-climax.

His marriage had never turned out the way he had hoped. It was a hopeless failure. The pretty young thing he had chosen to spend his life with had quickly turned into a crotchety, shapeless matron with a razor-sharp tongue. She seemed to derive an infinite amount of pleasure from playing with her husband; like a cat with a mouse, she would tease and torture him, taking his every move as a signal to pounce. Tom hated her as much as he had ever hated anyone, or could ever hate anyone. Not a stinging, burning hate but a dull, constant throb of loathing.

As it was fine, Tom decided to walk home that night and it was a few minutes after six when he arrived at his grubby little detached house in a nice enough suburb of the town. His wife was waiting for him, arms akimbo, at the back door. Tom forced a cheerful smile. “Hello, dear, how are you? Have you had a good day?”

He tried to start a conversation but he may just as well have spoken to one of the bodies in the subject store. His wife glared down contemptuously at the chubby little man. “And where have you been tonight? Gallivanting off with one of those lady friends of yours I dare say. Not a care for your poor wife slaving over a hot stove all day. Oh no! You enjoy yourself, Tom Whitehouse. Your meal is on the table and don’t blame me if it’s spoilt.”

Tom squeezed thankfully past his wife as soon as she had subsided a little. He had managed to get home early enough to allay her completely unfounded suspicions, though he knew that that never helped. He stared sickly at the anaemic cabbage and dried up meat, coated in brown, gelatinous gravy. With a sigh he sat down and ate his meal; his wife sat opposite, noisily sipped a cup of tea and watched him. She always ate her evening meal before he got home.

The atmosphere was almost as thick as the gravy which coated his meal and by the time he had come to the last potato, Tom could stand the silence no longer. He glanced across the table at his wife, she was still staring steadily at him. If looks could wither, Tom would long ago have become a prize possession for an Indian headhunter.

“What are we doing this weekend, my dear?” asked Tom.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Tom’s wife boiled over with rage, her fat jowls shook with fury, her dark brows zoomed inwards like halfbacks pouring in on an invading centre forward and the veins stood out on her vast white forehead.

“How do you expect me to know what we are going to do? Since when have I had a say in anything? Have you planned anything?”

“Well, er, nothing in particular my dear, nothing,” stammered Tom. “I have nothing in mind.” He noticed his wife’s mouth curling up at the edges, like stale bread, and added hastily, “unless you would like to come to St Christopher’s. On Sunday perhaps.”

He waited for a moment and having assured himself that his wife was not preparing any formidable verbal attack continued. “You’ve never come, there isn’t much to see but perhaps you would like to see where I work. You can have a look around the Pathological Museum; it’s a sort of super gruesome Madame Tussauds.” Tom chuckled, quite taken with his own suggestion.

“And what on earth would I want to spend my Sunday afternoon there for? Though I can’t expect you to think of anything better than that, I don’t suppose; and if we don’t do that we shan’t do anything.”

It was raining on Sunday, and by the time they arrived at the Medical School, they were both thoroughly soaked. Almost immediately Tom regretted having invited his wife to St Christopher’s at all. She was not the slightest bit interested in the museum, the place where the young gentlemen often took their young ladies, whether to frighten them or impress them Tom had never been quite sure.

She stalked around the corridors noisily, paying not the slightest attention to Tom’s entreaties for her to be quiet. She wandered gaily in and out of those laboratories which had been left open. She tutted and squawked at the experimental animals, cooped up in their tiny cages and in one of the narrow corridors rudely forced her way past the Assistant Dean who, as luck would have it, had slipped in to catch up on some paperwork.

Finally, the grand tour was over and Tom heaved a thankful sigh of relief. Only the subject store remained and then they could go home. Tom noticed the fading of his wife’s usually pale complexion before they got to the store door; but he was not ready for what happened as he opened the door.

He had not intended her to enter the room and merely held the door open for her; she leant forwards on tiptoe, gazing open-mouthed at the room of enshrouded bodies.

Suddenly she fainted.

It was a few seconds before Tom realised what had happened but it was not much longer before he had scooped her up in his powerful arms and placed her on one of the stone slabs. He darted across the room to fetch a beaker of water to sprinkle on her face. He heard her shouting, “I can’t expect you to think of anything better.” But when he turned, she was still lying, silent, on the stone slab where he had laid her.

He continued across the room but instead of fetching water, he picked up the syringe with which he injected his subjects with preservative. He filled it carefully and returned to his wife. As he placed the syringe in position, pushed it into a vein and began to squeeze the piston his wife began to stir. She half awoke, looked to see what he was doing and frowned, puzzled. Four times he filled the syringe and emptied its contents into his wife’s bloodstream until she moved no more.

It was only then that he realised what he had done.

In a flash, he darted across the room and shut and locked the door, which up till then had remained wide open. Next, he stripped his wife and bundled her clothes into a black plastic bag. He could take them to the furnace afterwards and destroy them.

An hour later his wife’s body was lined up on the slab; shaved, naked and preserved; stripped of all dignity and identity. He covered it with a white sheet, turned and left the room.

No one, he thought, as he trudged homewards alone, need suspect. His wife was little known and little liked; there was no one to miss her. She never spoke to the neighbours and had no friends or relatives.

As for the body, Tom was in an ideal position to dispose of it, his lists were never checked. If a body had a particularly unusual deformity, or an organ showing distinct signs of some disease then Tom would sometimes be required to prepare a report on the subject to accompany the specimen when it was introduced into the pathology museum. But that was a rare enough occurrence.

For three months the body lay in the subject store waiting for the next intake of medical students when it would accompany the other cadavers into the dissecting room. Meanwhile, the half-hearted gossip which had worried Tom a little after he had spread the word about his wife’s unfortunate illness and untimely death did not last for long. And Tom was much happier.

Month by month he watched his wife disappear under the eager scalpels of the preclinical students. First the arms, then the legs were removed and dissected. Within four months of appearing in the dissecting room, his wife’s body had become a grotesque and lonely torso. Tom could no longer recognise the woman to whom he had been married for so many miserable years, only the number of the table told him which body belonged to which name.

Tom was busy scrubbing up a new “customer” in readiness for the following year’s intake of students when Professor Simkins walked in. The Professor looked delighted. “One of the groups has discovered a most astonishingly distended spleen, can you let me know details of the patient’s disease, treatment, doctor and so on?”

“Can you tell me what table that is, Professor?” asked Tom.

The Professor thought for a moment and frowned. “No, I’m afraid not,” he confessed.

It was a long walk from the subject store to the dissecting room. Before they had got halfway there, a terrible thought struck Tom. What if the body should turn out to be his wife’s, the body without a death certificate or a record? His wife had always been awkward.

It was a shock to everyone when old Tom Whitehouse collapsed to the floor on being shown a distended spleen. But it wasn’t for several days that the gossip finally got itself sorted out. It seemed that Tom had collapsed and died after a heart attack.

There was quite a considerable amount of confusion about the subject store records. The file on one body could not be found anywhere. But fortunately, it had no exciting peculiarities and the remains were simply destroyed in the furnace.

First published in London Mystery Magazine in April 1966

About the Author

Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books. He has written over 100 books which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, HERE, there are hundreds of articles which are free to read.

There are no ads, no fees and no requests for donations on Dr. Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you want to help finance his work, please just buy a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman in print on Amazon.

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What’s in a body? – A story with a twist in the tale

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