ODDITIES

by Joelle Steele

Oddities

Floating in a sea of glass,
sealed forevermore,
rest the unusual and curious,
the strange, the rare in store.

The macabre hand in a jar
on its dusty altar thrives,
for only my eyes to see
that such a thing survives.

I am the collector, the guardian
of this mini-mausoleum,
a gloomy tribute to myself
in the form of a museum.

Sinister voices murmur
from this grim repository
uttering the morbid and perverse
that echo my own story.

Eclipsed in utter darkness
from their myriad jars and cases,
they recognize me as their kin,
an oddity life embraces.

CHAPTER 1
Friday, October 2

"Yeah, babe, gotta go now. Makin' my last stop and then I'll be on my way home. Wear that sexy little black thing for me, okay?"

Bucky Jenson slipped his cell phone into his jacket pocket as he navigated his UPS truck down Washington's State Route 6. The outskirts of Chehalis was coming into its full blaze of autumn color. And, in typical Pacific Northwest style, the sky was vivid blue with giant cumulus clouds flying by. He was midway between Ruth and Millburn, two places with names that were not attached to any town. Ruth was named after a woman who used to meet the train there, and Milburn was at the junction of the Northern Pacific Railroad. For some reason, the names stuck.

Bucky eventually made a left turn onto the narrow Donahoe Road that led to the Arden farm. The bumpy dirt and gravel road snaked through a forest of dark fir trees and half-naked hazelnuts still showing their gold and orange leaves.

"How do people survive out here in the middle of nowhere?" he muttered aloud to himself as passed through pasture lands and eventually pulled to a stop at the house where he frequently made deliveries. He went into the back of the truck to retrieve the package. It was a box about fifteen inches square, heavily taped, and marked 'Fragile' on every side. By his best estimate, it had to weigh at least 20 pounds. It came from Castle Antiques in San Francisco and was addressed to Royland Arden. Bucky knew the kinds of things that his old pal Roy collected, and wondered what this might be.

"Yo, Bucky! I thought I heard you," waved Roy. He was in his stockinged feet and well-worn jeans topped by a heavy dark brown sweater over a pale blue chambray shirt. Its cuffs and collars had seen better days.

The late afternoon breeze rattled the row of handmade wind chimes. Old forks and spoons, antique keys, dried bamboo, and carved wooden figures were suspended above a variety of quaint garden statuary that included a stone deer and frog next to a four-foot tall, chainsaw-carved grizzly bear. Bucky opened the back of his UPS truck and removed the hefty package.

Bucky and Roy went way back. They met when they lived in Longview and worked for Weyerhaeuser's paper manufacturing operation. Bucky was a delivery driver and Roy had just started in an entry level position as an accounting clerk after graduating with an AA in Business from South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia.

"Hey, Roy. Good to see you," replied Bucky. "It's kinda heavy," he said, handing over the heavy package. "I'd stick around to shoot the shit, but I've got my honey of a gal waiting for me."

Roy glanced at the label. He knew the name Castle Antiques, but he hadn't ordered anything from them for at least a year, maybe longer. Perhaps Georgina Castle had found something that she knew he would want and just sent it to him.

"Have a great evening Bucky!" he called out, as Bucky hopped up into his truck and drove away.

"Is that from Charmin' Charlee's?" asked Carole Arden excitedly, when Roy entered the kitchen with the package. "I ordered that pitcher and glasses two weeks ago. It's about time they got here."

"No, sorry darlin', not Charmin' Charlee's. This one's for me. From Castle Antiques."

"Oh?" replied Carole, surprised and disappointed that it wasn't her Fenton glass order, and also feeling a slight revulsion at the idea of what her husband might have bought.

Carole loved Roy with all her heart, but she didn't much care for his collecting tastes. She was glad that his wide assortment of creepy stuff had been long ago relegated to the old milk room next to the old barn. She only rarely went there, usually if Roy wasn't answering his cell phone. She couldn't understand how he could have a taste for such morbid oddities.

Like her, he was devoted to shopping for his weird collectibles at garage sales, flea markets, junk stores, estate sales, and antique malls. But he also shopped online where he scoured eBay and other stores that specialized in oddities and curiosities. And he was a stickler for authenticity. He wanted to be sure that he was buying the real thing and not something someone made out of bits of plastic and horsehair or had created with Photoshop.

Only a few weeks ago he had bought one of the first Ouija boards made in 1891 by the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore. It came wrapped in tissue paper in its original but dilapidated cardboard container and was in excellent condition with only a few scuffs and scratches around the edges of the board.

Carole didn't know much about Ouija boards but they were not at all creepy to her, especially in comparison to some of Roy's other collectibles, such as preserved animals and animal parts in jars, mummified and taxidermied animals, and human and animal bones.

Yes, Roy definitely had a penchant for dead things. He never failed to stop and collect road kill. He would take it home and attach it to a section of old chain link fence on the hill behind the barn so that the crows and other creatures could remove all the flesh from the bones. Then he would boil the skull in the propane burner he kept downwind of the house and barn. That removed most of the fleshy remnants, and whatever was left, he removed by hand.

After the skull was clean, he soaked it in hydrogen peroxide to whiten it. He glued in the teeth and then coated them with clear nail polish to keep them from cracking. He attached the upper and lower jaws and sprayed the skull with several coats of semi-gloss varnish. Once he was done, he sold the skulls online at a website he shared with his friend Andy Nilson, the local butcher and owner of Ice Blue Storage, a freezer rental company catering to the needs of local hunters. Andy often had skulls his customers didn't want, and so he also processed and then sold them online.

Roy put the heavily-wrapped box on the kitchen table, and Carole got the scissors out of the drawer and started cutting through the tape.

"What did you order?" she groaned. "I assume it's in a jar since it's stamped 'fragile' all over the place."

"I have no idea what this is," he grunted, pulling back the tape as Carole cut it. "But it's really heavy. I'm guessing that Castle Antiques must have found something they knew I couldn't live without," he chuckled.

"I shudder to think what that might be," she laughed, shaking her head.

Carole understood Roy's collecting habit because she was an incurable collector herself. She collected costume jewelry from the 1950s and 1960s that accessorized her daily wardrobe. But above all, she had acquired 283 pieces of Fenton art glass since she first began collecting it as a teenager. The house was a sparkling rainbow of Fenton that shone on every table, shelf, and cabinet. She had even talked Roy into making a trip with her to the Fenton factory in Williamstown, West Virginia.

Roy wasn't interested in Fenton or any other kind of glass at all, but he adored Carole and was more than happy to accommodate her passion for Fenton glass as well as her other collectibles.

"Well, this is why it's so heavy. It's in this metal box. Iron, I think," said Roy. He unlatched the box and pulled out a large glass jar.

"Oh yuck, yuck, yuck! That is soooooo hideous!" smirked Carole, stepping away from the table.

"Wow! This is amazing!"

"What is it?" she asked.

"I'm pretty sure it's a teratoma. Probably real too."
Roy carefully lifted the large jar from it's metal enclosure and set it on the table.
"What is a ... ter-teroma?" asked Carole, the corners of her mouth drooping, her face displaying her disgust.
"Teratoma. It's an unusual kind of tumor that can have tissue and organ parts in it, also hair, teeth, even eyes."

"That is absolutely horrible," said Carole, and she walked away from the table and started laying out the preparations for dinner on the kitchen counter.

"You are quite a beauty," Roy said softly to the mass of flesh and hair suspended in the jar.
He picked up a piece of paper from the box. It was a note to him signed by Ethan Grolier, the inventory manager at Castle Antiques. It read:

Georgina asked me to send this to you. She seemed sure you would want to have it.

Roy sifted through the wrappings but couldn't find an invoice. He assumed one would follow if he accepted the piece, so he set the note aside, and put the jar back into its metal box.

CHAPTER 2
Friday evening, October 2

It was an hour before dinner and Roy wanted to take his new treasure down to the milk room so that he could study it more closely and determine whether or not it was the real thing. He was very familiar with all the stuff people made so that someone could buy a spooky-looking thing in a jar to keep on a shelf for people to talk about. A few pieces of fatty steak, a sheep's eye, part of a pig's ear, hair recycled from a hairbrush, a deer's tooth, a chicken bone, maybe some cow brain, glue it all together, float it in a preservative. It didn't take much to produce a fake.

It was almost impossible to find these kinds of specimens for sale. First, they were quite rare. Second, most specimens, if not destroyed on removal from a human's body, were in the hands of doctors, scientists, or medical school museums. If by chance a real one did come up for sale, it was usually quite old, often more than a hundred years old. And it would be far more expensive than anything Roy could afford to pay.

He stepped into his moccasins, threw on a jacket, and grabbed his flashlight, cradling the boxed jar in his arms. Patches eagerly jumped up from his bed and followed alongside Roy. The outdoor lights on the house didn't cast their illumination all the way to the barn where the milk room was located, but his flashlight beam revealed the narrow dirt path that ran through a small pasture towards the barn.

***

The pasture was where Roy's great-aunt, Thelma Royland, had kept her goats. Roy had never been interested in animal husbandry. He wasn't the farming type, even though he grew up on a farm just twenty or so miles north in Rochester.

When Thelma died the year after Roy met Carole, she left him her 24-acre farm in the rural Lewis County area southwest of Chehalis. The couple moved in right after they were married and Carole decorated the place from top to bottom.

Roy had already made a few structural improvements to the house, and he also had two rusted mobile homes towed off the property and then tore down some of the out-buildings that were begging to be put out of their misery before they collapsed. And when the land was finally cleared of the debris, all that was left besides the house was the big barn and two smaller barns. He sold Thelma's goats and chickens to a neighboring farmer, Johnny Nieman, who then leased Roy’s three biggest pastures to graze his cows.

He and Carole enjoyed their life on what they always referred to as 'Thelma's Farm.' It was peaceful and quiet, green and lush with trees and foliage, and far from the hustle and bustle of town life – not that Chehalis with its population of about 7,600 was all that busy. They doted on their two dogs, Patches and Sugar, and their four cats, Halo, Poppy, Reno, and Smoke.

They didn't have children together. Roy had always had some serious reservations about passing on his polydactyl genes to some poor unsuspecting kid. Carole had never cared that he had extra digits on his hands and feet. She was one of those people who didn't notice it until he pointed it out, and he did that on their first date, fearing that she might later notice, be repulsed by it, and end up breaking his heart.

"Oh," she said calmly and casually, as he spread his hands out before her on a restaurant table. "I guess that must run in your family?"

She may have found his collectible oddities creepy, but she didn't seem to find his extra digits creepy at all. Bless her heart, she took all his old gloves to Geier Glove Company in Centralia  and they made him new custom gloves, ready in time for Christmas every year.

Carole had two boys from her previous marriage. They were in high school when he met her, and after they had graduated, he and Carole had tied the knot. At that time, she was Carole Auerbach, born a Grainger, recently divorced, and working as an administrative assistant at Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington.

Roy first met her the day he took off from work to drive to the hospital and pick up his roommate Brian, who was being released after suffering a broken leg in an automobile accident. While waiting for Brian, Roy went to the cafeteria to grab a bite to eat. That was where he first laid eyes on his future wife.

Carole was a petite, cheerful, blonde woman and she was nine years older than Roy, although he didn't learn that little detail at first. But it didn't matter. He fell in love with her at first sight, and after quickly drumming up the courage to engage in conversation, he also managed to ask her out, even though she lived 40 minutes south of him. He didn't care. The moon would not have been too far to travel to be with Carole. Her ocean-blue eyes, her warm smile, and her musical voice won him over instantly. And he was as much in love with her now as he was ten years ago – maybe even more.

He especially loved her because she had told him a story about her nephew, the late ghost-hunter, Michael Grainger, and how he had died in England while chasing down spirits in a ghostly mansion. It was quite a tale.

***

The milk room was dark and Roy flipped the switch to reveal an array of open shelves, and glass-doored cabinets filled with his treasures – his "creepy stuff" as Carole called it. He just called his treasures curiosities and oddities, and this teratoma showed great promise in being one of his greatest treasures to date. He would have to find a special place to show it off.

Patches sniffed at the floor and rolled over onto a dog bed in front of the old Franklin stove. There was no fire burning in it, but the room was only slightly chilly due to Roy's diligent  efforts to heavily insulate the room from top to bottom. He removed the jar from the box and set it down on the distressed wooden work bench he got at a yard sale in Tenino. He turned on the work lamp to get a closer look at his latest and most unexpected acquisition.

It was firmly packed into a 64-ounce jar sealed with a hard black substance. He gently tapped the tarry material with the handle of his screwdriver and it didn't crack. He wasn't sure how he was going to open the jar to see if this was a real teratoma or a manufactured fake, and he didn't know why the additional sealing substance had been applied to it. He tapped it again and felt a sharp pain in his head at the same time that he could have sworn he saw an eye in the teratoma. He looked again and it was gone.

It was almost time for dinner, and he turned out the light and headed back to the house with Patches at his heels. The scent of garlic wafted towards him as he stepped onto the porch. Carole was cooking Italian.

CHAPTER 3
Wednesday, October 7

It was 7:15 a.m., and Carole filled the tea kettle and placed it on the stove in her hybrid kitchen – part 1904 traditional, part 1988 contemporary, part begging for a 21st century facelift. Since the house passed its centennial, Carole had continued her usual pondering of all the pros and cons of kitchen remodeling, but always decided against it. Too many potentially serious problems with access to the property in particular, plus the effect such an undertaking would have on all her collections, especially her Fenton glass. The house may have been an antique, but she always kept the old-fashioned interior immaculately clean and in good condition, and the kitchen was warm and toasty by the time she set about her daily activities.

Roy was already down in the milk room, the 200 square-foot room that was part of the large barn. He had claimed it for himself when he first inherited the farm. After he removed the bulk tank and the old wooden milking stanchions, he used the leftover lumber from some of the tear-downs on the property to build a better floor and shelving along the walls.

He ran electricity to the room, and insulated the walls, floor, and ceiling. He kept the small wood-burning Franklin stove because it could get pretty cold in the winter. There was already plumbing, and he left the old concrete sink in place. And finally, he installed locks on both doors and all three windows. They wouldn't keep the nosy neighborhood kids away entirely. They would still peer in the windows now and again. But it would keep them out of it when he wasn't around.

For five years he had been planning to open a museum, a roadside attraction that would display his growing collection of oddities and curiosities, the unusual and the unexplained, the macabre and the mysterious. He had more time to take on that project now. After commuting to Weyerhaeuser in Longview for two years, he took a job with the State of Washington in Olympia where he honed his already top-notch computer skills. Two years later, he left the State and started his own home-based computer consulting business. Without a long commute he had more free time and more income to finance his venture.

He had already picked out a place for the museum. Carole thought it was a silly idea, but she had listened courteously as he described his plans.
"I'm going to move the two small barns – we never use them and they're in great shape. I'll bring them down to where you can see them from Old Highway 603."

"Why not just get a shed you can put together from a kit?" asked Carole.

"The barns are great old wood and they're much bigger than any shed. I'll merge them together, do a little fixing up here and there. I'll install a state-of-the-art security system so I can monitor the place from the house, and then I'll move the collection in."

"Honestly, Roy," interrupted Carole. "I understand how much you love your stuff, but who's going to find it way out here in the middle of nowhere?"

"Got that covered. I'm going to make a gigantic sign and put it on the roof of the place. It'll be visible to any tourist or local who drives along State Route 6. They can't miss it."

"Will you advertise too?"

"I'll probably have to, just to get things going," he offered. "I've still got to expand the collection a little before I do anything."

He was well on the way to doing so. He was always very careful what he bought, but he had been collecting long enough to know who had the kinds of things he wanted.

His collection was  divided into four specialty areas. First, there were dental appliances (some made from real teeth); prosthetic devices; surgical tools; and medicine bottles that once contained substances such as heroin or arsenic.

Second, there were more than 400 old photographs of dead people, both Victorian 'memento mori' and post mortem murder and suicide photos; about 450 photographs of people with unusual deformities; and picture frames and jewelry made of woven human hair.

Third, there was his extensive library that included, but was not limited to, books on magic, aliens, UFOs, science fiction, embalming, ancient history, and antiquated medical practices and procedures.

Fourth, and most important of all, were his dead things – six shrunken heads; a human skull with remnants of hair attached; a mummified monkey; a stuffed two-headed piglet; two dozen animal skulls and teeth; and a large array of more than 500 specimens sealed in glass containers ranging from tiny pill bottle sizes all the way up to giant, sealed, gasketed canning jars.

It was the jarred items that interested him the most. Floating in solutions of formalin, formaldehyde, or alcohol, were the two-headed piglet, a pair of eyeballs that appeared human but were probably from a great ape, six jars that contained things he had yet to open and identify – now seven with the newly acquired teratoma – and a human hand with two thumbs and an extra finger.

***

The polydactyl hand was the first oddity he had ever acquired. It was in 1999 when he was attending a meeting at the Weyerhaeuser corporate offices in Federal Way. He went looking for something to eat before he drove home that day. It was a warm summer afternoon, and he decided to eat at Joe's Deli. But on the way there, he was stopped cold in his tracks by a sign pointing to a garage sale on a side street.

After years of visiting garage sales, he had seen a lot of junk for sale, but every now and then, he'd seen something he could use, like the lawn mower he got for $20 at a garage sale he stopped at on his way home from spending a day at the Star-Lite Market Place, a giant flea market in Tacoma.

But this garage sale was different. This was where he saw the hand in the jar, and he knew immediately that he had to have it.

He got it about twenty years ago from an older guy who was a retired biologist. He had a bunch of other similar specimens he was selling, but that hand really caught his eye.

"What do you want for it?" asked Roy.

"How does $40 sound?"

Roy would have paid any price for it, and this was a bargain too good to pass up.

"It's a deal," said Roy as he handed over the cash.
He took the jar home to his apartment in Longview where he opened it up to inspect it. It was real, which was what he suspected when he first saw it. And it led him to his fascination – his obsession some might say – with the oddities, the curiosities.

CHAPTER 4
Sunday, October 11

All of Roy's interests and his collecting were motivated by his extra fingers and toes and, more recently, an extra kidney. The kidney had showed up on an X-ray taken after he broke a rib when he fell off a ladder while cleaning the roof gutters following a storm. There it was, right next to the other left kidney. He didn't know if there was a word to describe someone with an extra kidney.

As a child he also had two extra lower teeth on both sides of his mouth, but his parents had them removed when he was 12 because they were forcing his front teeth out of alignment and they didn't have money for braces. As far as he knew, there were no other additional parts in his body. But, you never know. Who could tell what might show up on another X-ray some day?

As an adult, Roy had always been self-confident, despite his extra digits. He was tall and lanky with gray eyes and thick dark brown hair. Women had always found him attractive. The extra digits never stopped him from doing anything.

He usually took his shoes to Ben Whistler, the local shoe repair guy who stretched and widened the shoes for him. He bought wide sized shoes to begin with, but more toes meant the toes didn't always fit in the toe box correctly. So Whistler fine tuned them. As far as Roy had been able to determine,  there were only a few places online that sold shoes specifically for someone like him. They weren’t exactly for the six-toed feet, but he found most of his shoes from Wyde, Topo, and Softstar Primal. Some were not a perfect fit, but with a little stretching in all the right places by Ben, they always managed to fit.

As a child, Roy's father, Gil, was disappointed and embarrassed at having two sons who, in his mind, were 'freaks.' He considered Roy to be the biggest freak because he had fully-formed extra fingers and toes, two extra teeth, and now that extra kidney.

Gil had somehow managed to escape the extra digits that ran in his mother's side of the family, the Roylands. But Gil's mother, Beatrice, had an extra toe and extra finger on her right side, and it hadn't stopped her from working at Boeing's branch in Chehalis during World War II, where she helped build parts for the B-17 and B-29 bombers.

When Roy was a young boy, his mother, Edith, stood up to her husband. She was a tough, hard-working farmer's daughter, and was always arguing with Gil about his treatment of his multi-toed sons, Roy and Karl.

"They're just little boys," she said. "They need you to stand up for them when they're teased, to comfort them when other kids make fun of them."

"They're freaks of nature! All of them!" ranted Gil, referring to his extended family of polydactyls.
"It runs in your family, Gil. It's a Royland trait. It just didn't happen to show up on your own body. Your mother, your sister, and two of your brothers weren't as lucky, were they? You should be grateful that our boys can both walk normally, that they're healthy and normal in all other ways."

Some of the family could hide their structural enhancements, especially the ones with extra toes, like Karl. You could bury those toes in your shoes. It wasn't as easy to hide your extra fingers. But to hear his father talk about it, you'd think polydactylism was a sin. Or a crime. Roy could never understand why Gil couldn't instead focus his attention on the few real black sheep on the Royland side of the family instead of dwelling on the unfortunate relatives who merely had to deal with their unusual genetic traits. And the Roylands had no shortage of black sheep, polydactyls or otherwise.

Gil's great-aunt Evelyn Royland had a daughter, Rhoda Maxwell, who was long dead and gone. No one knew if she had any extra digits, but only a few years earlier it was discovered that she had murdered her baby brother and two of her three husbands.

And then there was Roy's cousin, Steven "Red" Royland, his great-aunt Thelma's illegitimate teenage son. Red killed an elderly neighbor woman with an ax when she teased him about his extra thumb after he spent the day chopping firewood for her. When the police came to question him, he tried to run away and was shot and killed by one of them.

And then there was Malcolm "Bully" Royland, Roy's great-grandfather. Little was known of his parents except that his father was Robby Royland, a sailor lost at sea, and his mother was Winnie Muckles, who died giving birth to Malcolm. So, it was also unknown whether Bully or his parents had any extra digits. Nevertheless, he wasn't an ancestor of whom the family could be proud.

Bully took to the streets after his father was lost at sea. He was only 11 years old at the time, and he eventually became a fisherman in Ramsgate, a seaside town in Kent, England, a town where artist Vincent Van Gogh had once taken up a brief residence as a teacher in 1876. When he was about 37 years old, Bully entered into a relationship with a 26 year-old widow from neighboring Plucks Gutter, named Annie Swank.

Bully lived up to his nickname. He drank heavily and when he drank he turned nasty and picked on the weakest man in sight. And if he couldn't find a man to beat up, he was satisfied with using Annie as his punching bag to vent whatever inner demons he was harboring. According to the genealogical research that Roy's late aunt, Regina, had compiled, Bully was accused of accidentally killing his three year-old daughter Jenny in 1893. And the following year, he was accused of accidentally killing a local man named Melvin Capp by pushing him down a flight of stairs. Somehow, Bully managed to be found not guilty in both cases. But in 1895, Bully's luck ran out when he strangled and killed a local prostitute, Gladys Muldar. He was shot and killed by a bartender, Louis Furlong, as he choked the last breath out of Gladys in front of three witnesses outside the bar.

Unfortunately, Roy's father didn't seem to think these family skeletons were worthy of scorn. It was only the genetic curse of polydactylism that seemed to preoccupy him. And his father's voice still echoed in Roy's ears to this day, although he fought hard to rise above it, to be accepted by his peers.

Fortunately, Roy's mother loved and accepted her children as they were, and most adults were far too politically correct to mention anyone's extra fingers, if they noticed them at all. And Roy was genuinely surprised at how many people didn't. It took his friend Bucky six months to notice the extra fingers. But when Roy was growing up, everyone knew about Gil’s family and their extra digits.

That was why Roy's friend Matt always knew. They grew up together.

"Just ignore them, Roy," said 13 year-old Matt.

"Easy for you to say," replied teenaged Roy.

"Aww, come on! Remember that old TV show, 'Outer Limits'? There was this guy who grew a sixth finger on each hand and he was super smart."

"I don't think there's a chance my extra fingers will make me any smarter, Matt," said Roy grimacing as two of his tormenters came within range.

"Hey, it's Freaky Fingers!" yelled one of his classmates, pointing and laughing hysterically.

"Yeah, Freako!” yelled the other boy. “My father says your family's nothing' but a buncha inbred hillbillies!"

Ah yes, the good old days. Roy was so delighted that they were long gone. And since then, courtesy of the Internet, he had discovered that there were other people – sometimes famous people – who had extra toes or fingers. But most of them had their extra digits surgically removed as children. This was usually because they lacked bones. Roy’s spares had bones.

***

When he was 23 years old, and shortly after he had purchased the polydactyl hand in the jar, Roy had driven to Seattle to consult with Dr. Richard C. Legrand, a specialist in polydactylism, to find out if he might be harboring any of the rather serious disease syndromes that were sometimes associated with the disorder.

As far as Roy could tell, no one in his family had ever had any other diseases, but he wanted to be sure. And he also wanted to know if extra digits were caused by inbreeding.

"First of all, I want to assure you that having extra fingers and toes, and in your case extra teeth, is not a result of inbreeding," explained Dr. Legrand. "You have postaxial polydactyly, type A, meaning you have fully-formed extra digits located after your fifth digits – your little fingers and toes."

"And what about some of the serious disease syndromes I've read about that cause polydactylism?" asked Roy.

"You don't have any of them," assured the doctor. "What you have is simply a congenital anomaly, a random mutation, probably of the GLI3 gene. Mutations in the GL13 gene, which is located on chromosome 7p, can cause polydactylism by disrupting early limb patterning, often leading to extra digits. Any member of your family has about a fifty percent chance of inheriting it, even if not all of them have the extra digits to show for it."

"Should mine have been removed when I was born? What about now? Should I have surgery?"

"There's nothing wrong with your extra fingers or toes, Roy, " said Legrand. "Having them removed in early childhood or at any other time is definitely not a necessity, and depending on how those digits were formed, it might not even be advisable at any age. Parents who do this are usually just overly concerned about the appearance of the extra digits on their brand new little human being. It's more about vanity than anything else."

"My parents didn't have the money."

"Which is just as well. You're a perfectly healthy young man," assured the doctor. "And you're fortunate that your extra fingers and toes aren't deformed."

"None of us have deformed digits, just fully-functional extras," said Roy.

And so ended the consultation. He went home feeling relieved.

CHAPTER 5
Thursday, October 22

Roy tried to pry open the teratoma jar again. The dark tarry substance was impossible to remove. He even tried to stab at it with an old ice pick. All he was doing was getting a very bad headache and an excruciating pain in his left eye.

Leave the seal alone.

Roy jumped backward. It was a voice in his head. It had to be. But it seemed so very real. He stopped trying to open the jar, not because of the voice which he was sure came from the depths of his own mind, but because of the sharp pains in his left eye, the area where his headache seemed to be centered. It was probably eye strain. He had been up reading until late the night before.

The teratoma could wait. He headed back to the house to take a pain reliever and spent the rest of the day on the couch watching TV and dozing. It rained the following day, and while his headache was now gone, he didn't feel like doing anything except more of what he did the day before.

***

Monday, October 24

At 10:00 a.m., Roy took a few minutes to call Castle Antiques about the teratoma.

"Well, Roy, make me an offer," said Georgina Castle.
"I'm not sure if it's real or what it's worth if it is," said Roy. "How does $100 sound?"

"That's fine," she replied. "I'll have the office send you an invoice. If it turns out it isn't real – and I don't know how you'll determine that – let me know and I'll refund your money."

"Thanks, Georgina," he said. "By the way, where did you get this? Was it from a doctor?"

"Actually, it came to us from an estate sale we did for a deceased 93 year-old woman whose father was a biologist here in San Francisco. I assume it originally belonged to him, although how he acquired it, I don't know. But given his daughter's age, it has to be at least 100 years old."

Roy really didn't know what a teratoma might cost. He had been looking for one for about fifteen years. He had seen all kinds of tumor specimens, but never a human one. He had a preserved tumor from a cow that he bought from a veterinarian for $50. He paid $200 for the two-headed piglet. He thought maybe a teratoma might run about $200 to $300, if it was real. And if it was real, he was an honest man, and he would pay Castle Antiques more than the $100 he and Georgina Castle had agreed on.

He was anxious to try to open the jar again so that he could see if the teratoma was real, but he had to earn a living, and he was working on debugging a program for a client in Reno, Nevada. He went into the guest room that doubled as his office and sat down at one of his four computers. Investigation of the teratoma could wait another day.

CHAPTER 6
Wednesday, November 4

Broadway in the antique district of Tacoma was almost bare. There were not many shoppers on the rare occasions when the rain came down in buckets instead of the more familiar Pacific Northwest weather patterns of mist and drizzle. Randy Hunter pulled his old Range Rover up to the driveway curb in front of his store, Treasure Hunter Antiques.

He turned off the engine and got out of the car, looking up and down the row of storefronts along the narrow street that marked the antique district. As usual, most of the shops were still closed, while others, as on any day of the year, seemed to be perpetually closed. Opening time was 11 a.m.

As he approached the front door of his store, he debated about whether he should open for the day at all. There probably wouldn't be many customers in this much rain. He thought he might turn around and go back home to his cozy Victorian out in the Proctor neighborhood and read a good book in front of a nice warm fire with his golden retriever, Molly, by his side.

"Hey, there!" came a familiar voice, just as Randy was about to leave.

"Hey there yourself. How are ya, Roy?"

"Okay. Just making the rounds. Carole's up the street having a coffee."

"You should have her come in. I just rearranged all the glassware yesterday." He turned the key in the lock, and as the two men entered the store Randy turned on the lights and nodded towards the cabinets that displayed a colorful array of glass that gleamed a cheerful response.

"Looks nice. Got anything new in? Anything unusual?" asked Roy.

"Maybe. I just got a set of about 200 crime photos from the 1930s or thereabouts. A lot of dead people. Pretty gory in my opinion, but I've been holding them for you before I put them online. If they aren't your cup of tea, I also just took a consignment of a medical kit from the mid-18th century and the same client also left a set of 19th century glass and brass syringes."

"Well, let's start with the photos and go on from there."

Randy reached under the counter and pulled out a box filled with old black-and-white photographs and passed them across the counter to Roy, and left him to examine them while he went to greet a woman who had just entered the store.

It seemed like there weren't as many people buying antiques the way they used to, so Randy always tried to be friendly and helpful to potential customers. Of course, nowadays a lot of people bought their collectibles online – if they bought them at all – and Randy sold online too. But instead of customers, he more often got 50-somethings who came in wanting to sell their late parents' junk that they didn't want and that they were sure was worth far more than Randy would pay for it, much less sell it for. He returned to the front counter after the browser left.

"I'm afraid these are not really what I look for," said Roy, sliding the box back across the counter. "But I'd like to see the medical gear."

"Sure thing. It's in the back. Watch that front door for me, will ya?"

Roy wandered around the store, glancing regularly in the direction of the front door. He'd heard Randy's stories about people coming in and shoplifting when he was working alone and had to leave the floor to use the bathroom or get something from the storeroom.

An old glass pickle jar with a silver lid and tongs hanging from its ornate handle caught his eye. He would have to tell Carole about it since she loved pickle jars and had quite a few, but he could never remember exactly what she had. He was also never sure if something that looked like Fenton glass was really Fenton and not another glassmaker that simply used the same molds.

Of course, Carole didn't buy only Fenton, and even he could see that this was a very beautiful old jar regardless of its manufacturer.

"Here ya go!" said Randy, setting a small chest and a leather case on the counter. "I haven't really had a lot of time to examine these, so I haven't put a final price on them yet. So, if you're interested, we can talk turkey."

"Sure," said Roy, opening the leather case to find the set of syringes. They were in good condition, nothing out of the ordinary for their kind, and he already had several that were very similar. He closed up the case and pulled the chest towards him and opened it.

"Not interested in the syringes?" asked Randy.

"No, I don't think so. But this is actually an old apothecary chest," said Roy as he opened some of the drawers and removed the jars to assess their condition, and in some cases their contents. "Where did you get it?"

"They both came from Karl Bergman's estate."

"Karl died? Gee, I'm really sorry to hear that. I always like him."

"Yeah, he was a great guy and an amazing collector," said Randy. "His daughter said she's going to bring me some other items from his collection, but I'm not sure what they'll be. He was a careful collector, but he was also quite eclectic. No telling what he might have left behind. I'll let you know if there's anything you might be interested in."

"Hmmmm. Well, I might be interested in this chest. What are you asking?"

"I was thinking about $1,200," replied Randy.

A shooting pain ripped through Roy's left eye.

This asshole's trying to rob you blind!

He ignored the voice in his head.

"I was thinking more around $500," countered Roy.

"Double that."

And you thought this dickhead was your friend?

"$750, final offer," said Roy, his eye pierced with pain as his entire head started to throb.

"No can do. I won't make anything off it that low.

Sorry, Roy. I guess no deal today."

The two men shook hands and Roy left to find Carole to see if she had any aspirin. He found her across the street rummaging through a bin of cat prints.

"Hi, babe. Isn't this sweet?" she asked, holding up an antique print of kittens.

"Yeah, very cute," he smiled absently. "I've got a monster of a headache. Stabbing pains in my eye. Do you have anything for it?"

"I have some acetaminophen."

She dug through her purse and pulled out a small bottle that she handed to him. Then she gave him her water bottle.

"It's not like you to have a headache. You just had one a couple days ago."

"I feel like it's the same thing all over again. And I thought I heard a voice in my head too," he whispered.

"Oh Roy! That's awful. If this continues, you should see a doctor."

***

They walked up the street to a small restaurant to eat lunch before heading back home.

"I forgot to tell you. I saw a nice old pickle jar at Treasure Hunter's. Don't know if it's Fenton, but it's old and pretty."

After eating, they went back to Treasure Hunter's to look at the pickle jar.

"You're back. Hi, Carole! So did you change your mind about the chest?" asked Randy.

"No, we're here to look at a pickle castor," said Carole.

"Okay, let me know if I can show you anything else," added Randy, and returned to cleaning a piece of jewelry behind the counter.

"You're right, Roy, it's just lovely," said Carole, as she ran her fingers over the glass castor. "Definitely not Fenton. A little pricey, I think. I wonder if he'd consider an offer?"

"He wasn't much of a bargainer with me earlier," said Roy.

"Hey Randy, would you take $125 for this?" she asked.

This joker isn't worth his weight in crap.

Roy almost fell over as the pain shot through his eye. He bumped into a table and caught hold of a pottery vase just before it fell to the floor.

C'mon, man! Grow a backbone and give him a piece of your mind!

"Yeah, I can do $125," replied Randy.

"Oh, so you'll make a deal with her, but not with me?" shouted Roy, his face growing red. "What kind of place are you running here? Is business so bad that you can't consider a reasonable offer from one of your best customers?"

"Hey, listen man I ...," began Randy.

"Roy! For God's sake! What's gotten into you?" whispered Carole.

"There's nothing wrong with me. But there's something very wrong with him!"

"I apologize, Randy," said an embarrassed Carole, putting the jar back on the shelf. She took hold of her husband's arm and lead him out of the store as a startled Randy stared curiously at a man he had been doing business with for more than ten years.

"What the hell was that about?" Randy wondered aloud.

"Let go of my arm!" said Roy, pulling away from Carole's grasp.

"What is the matter with you? You're acting like someone I don't even know," said Carole.

"Oh wow, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry," said Roy. "My head feels like it's going to crack wide open. I gotta get home and lay down. Are you okay with driving?"
Without speaking further, they walked to where their old Jeep Wrangler was parked.

They arrived home after one o'clock and Roy went straight to bed.

CHAPTER 7
Friday, November 6

"Well, hello sleepy-head. How are you feeling?" asked Carole, when he wandered into the kitchen that following morning. "Can I get you something to eat?"

"I feel okay, but I'm not that hungry. He grabbed an apple and headed for the milk room.

The teratoma was waiting for him, sitting on the work bench where he had left it on Friday. His previous attempt to break the jar's seal was unsuccessful, so he decided to examine it from the outside, beginning with the jar itself.

Roy had seen about every kind of specimen jar ever made. Many of his specimens were in jars that were from the mid-1800s, although he could not date the specimens within them as easily. Most of his jars were clear, thick glass, although a few were a pale green or blue. Some had the manufacturer's name embossed on their sides, and some had no maker's marks anywhere on them. The ones that held dry specimens were primarily domed bell jars, and the others were canning jars, usually with glass lids and metal clamps, although there were a few that had screw-on metal lids.

The teratoma jar was made of thick, clear, pale bluish glass. Based on what he knew about glass from his previous research and from listening to Carole talk endlessly about glass, he knew it was old. It was mold-made and the two seams were visible. The glass had grown slightly cloudy and yellowish in places, and it displayed a variety of bubbles and inclusions and two dark ring stains towards the bottom. It had an embossed label that was so worn that he couldn't quite make it out entirely. It appeared to read  'Lichtman' or 'Fichtman,' both names he had not encountered on any of the other jars that held his specimens.

He guessed that the jar was likely made between about 1890 and 1920. The lid didn't look like any he had or any he'd seen on an antique jar before. Instead of a clamp-style lid or screw-on lid, this one had a brass, flat top that was secured to a brass ring around the neck by three long eye screws. Where one would expect to find a rubber gasket was instead the dark, tarry, and seemingly impenetrable substance. The ring stains were an obvious result of previous use, so he knew the teratoma was not the original inhabitant of the jar.

To examine the specimen itself, he opened the top drawer of his work table to reveal the many magnifiers that he used to examine the contents of jars and other non-containerized items. His hand-held lenses ranged from 6X to 20X, plus one 20X triplet set which, when all three lenses were aligned, provided up to 60X magnification. He decided to start with a simple 10X magnifying glass that would let him see if there were any tell-tale signs of a man-made fake. He maneuvered the arm of his work lamp until it lit the jar without creating a reflection.

A sharp pain shot through his head and into his left eye. He sat back in his chair and waited for the pain to subside. Within a minute it did, and he returned to scanning the jar with the magnifying glass.

From what was visible, he could see that the item consisted of two small teeth that appeared to be human molars growing side-by-side from a piece of flesh; a yellowish fat that meandered throughout the tumor like the marbling on a good rib eye steak; a thick section of dark hair, about three inches long, growing from reddish-brown flesh; some thin, semi-transparent, pinkish skin; assorted segments of flesh with visible veins; the tip of a toe or baby's finger with nail intact; and a small piece of curved bone deeply embedded in the rest of the mass. And then he saw what he thought he had glimpsed the last time he looked at the teratoma: an eye, its top lid partially closed over it.

"This is absolutely real," he said aloud to himself.

Of course it's real. Any fool can see it's real. Although we will have to agree on what is real, won't we?

Not the damn voice again. He knew it was coming from inside his head, not from the jar, not from a ghost, not from one of the shrunken heads, not from the two-headed piglet, and certainly not from Patches, who was a good communicator for a dog, but wasn't exactly capable of abstract thought related on a psychic level.

"Roy!" came Carole's voice as she approached the milk room.

Get rid of the bitch! Women are pests!

"Roy, you didn't answer your phone," said Carole as she calmly walked into the room. "Are you ready for something to eat now?"

"I – " his voice trailed off as another pain jabbed at his eye and everything went black. He fell to the floor.

***

"It's just a very bad headache," said Roy, holding his hand against his forehead. "Really, I don't need to go to the hospital."

"Okay, sir, I’m going to leave now, but if you need me again, just call,” said the paramedic. “And I recommend that you see your doctor and get checked out first thing in the morning. If you lose consciousness again you could hit your head on concrete or run your car into a tree."

"Thank you. I'll go see the doctor."

"I'll make sure he does. Thank you for coming so quickly, especially when we're so far out of town," added Carole.

"Well, luckily I was over in Ceres when I got the call,” said the paramedic as he loaded up his gear and headed back down the rocky private road to State Route 6.

"Let's get you into bed, and I'll call Dr. Voorhees and schedule an appointment."

"No, I'm not going to bed and I don't need to see a doctor. I only said that so the paramedic guy  wouldn't keep harping on it."

"But Roy ..."

"Carole, get off my case about this! It was just a bad headache."

She's the headache! Why do you put up with her?

"I just think it would be a good idea to ..."

"To run up a medical bill that we don't need?"

"To make sure you're okay. I'm going to make the appointment and I'll go with you."

"Damn it, Carole! Don't tell me what to do!"

He stumbled and stepped backward on Sugar's tail. The golden-haired spaniel squealed loudly.

"Roy, be careful ..."

He reeled around and slapped her hard in the face.

"Leave. Me. Alone!" he yelled, then grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the house and down to the milk room.

Carole stood frozen in time and space, her mind unable to process what had just happened. Tears stung her eyes and trickled down her face, as she struggled to regain her control and ease back into the present. She felt the shooting pangs in her cheek and she cradled the tender area in her hand as she walked to the refrigerator and pulled an ice pack from the freezer.

Roy had never yelled at her or raised a hand against her in their entire ten years of marriage. He never yelled at all, and he was never violent.

Something had to be wrong with him. Seriously wrong.

CHAPTER 8
Saturday, November 7

Roy sat down at his work bench. He wasn't sure how long he had been sitting there, but when he finally looked up, it was 7:44 p.m. and it was pitch black outside. He felt like he had just woken up from a long, warm nap, even though the room was chilly.

He pulled the swing lamp towards him and turned over the jarred teratoma in his hands as he admired it. He couldn't seem to turn away, to resist looking at such a fascinating thing. A human had somehow created that massive tumor composed of bits and pieces of all too recognizable body parts. He could identify with the person who had grown that thing in their own body. He could even sympathize with them. It was an extra something that no human would ever want or need. Like extra fingers, toes, teeth, or a kidney. He wondered who had suffered with it. Did they survive it?

Define survive.

No shooting pain accompanied the voice this time.

"Survival, in this case, means they continued to live without it," said Roy aloud in a sing-song voice, realizing that he was talking to himself and hoping that by talking out loud he might be able to stop his own voice inside his head. It wasn't like he was hearing someone else's voice talking in the room.

Finally, he got up from the chair and turned off the swing lamp. Patches wasn't with him and he couldn't remember if he had followed him to the milk room or not. He put on his jacket and walked back to the house.

The back door to the kitchen was open slightly. He stepped in and closed it behind him and turned the deadbolt latch. It was unlikely anyone would ever come up their road or try to steal anything from them, but better safe than sorry.

The house was so quiet that he could hear the antique Kit Cat clock's tail making a ticking sound over the slight electrical buzzing sound it usually made. Poppy was asleep on a kitchen chair and didn't stir when he walked in. Neither did Sugar who was curled up in her bed near the wood box.

"Carole?"

He walked into the living room and glanced around. Reno and Smoke were sleeping on the ottoman next to Carole's chair, back-to-back, their tails covering their faces. Her purse was hanging on its hook next to the front door. He went upstairs.

"Carole?" he called as he entered the master bedroom.

She wasn't there. He continued going from room to room, even checking out the closets, but she wasn't in the house. So why was her purse still on the hook. He went over to it and opened it up. Yes, this was her purse-of-the-day, as she liked to call whichever one hung on the hook. Her keys were in it along with her wallet and a few hundred other necessities.

He took a second glance around the room and saw her cell phone on the coffee table. She never went anywhere without that phone. He always teased her that she should have it glued to her ear. She didn't think it was funny. She merely liked to stay in touch.

"Carole!" he yelled this time. But still no answer. He was about to call the police when he decided to have a look around outside. He put his jacket back on and grabbed the flashlight from where he had left it on the counter in the mud room. The Kit Kat clock showed 8:12 p.m.

The cold air was still and it blasted his face. The sky was black and covered with sparkling diamonds. He always loved to sit on the back porch and look at the stars on nights like this. The porch had a beautiful southwest view that had a long, wide clearance just above the lowest trees down towards State Route 6. Great for their satellite dish reception and great for stargazing. Tonight he could quickly pick out Orion as he walked down the path to the milk room and then veered down a muddy rut that led to the Nieman's property.

"Carole!" he called her name, just in case.

"I'm over here," she called.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he turned to the sound of her voice. She was standing next to one of the pasture fences talking to Johnny and his wife Dee Dee, and at her side were Patches and Sugar. She was wearing her heavy yellow fleece parka that practically glowed in the dark next to a lantern held by Johnny Nieman.

"Hey Johnny, nice to see you," said Roy, shaking the man's hand.

Johnny leased the Arden' pastures for his cows, and he was a good tenant, always paying on time and always keeping the fences in good repair and the fields as clean as possible, given all the hooves that trod upon it. He also paid for half of the routine well inspections and maintenance that insured the water that filled the pasture troughs was always clean and safe. Since the same well was the sole source of Roy and Carole's domestic water, it was a win-win arrangement.

"Nice to see you too," said Johnny. I was just telling your wife that me and Dee Dee are having our last barbecue of the year up at the house next Saturday. We was hoping you'd like to come along."

"Sure, sounds great. We'll be there," said Roy.

Johnny and Dee Dee walked off into the darkness and Roy and Carole stood were left leaning on the pasture fence, their dogs beside them.

"I'm so sorry about earlier. I swear I don't know what got into me. Please forgive me."

"I don't want to get in a fight with you again, but surely you must realize that you need to see a doctor, right?"

"Yes, yes, I do," agreed Roy. And he meant it.

Something was wrong with him. Voices, violence, passing out – all signs of ... a brain tumor? He always thought the worst when he got a headache since he got them so infrequently.

But the rest of the week flew by quickly and without incident. He was working every day on reprogramming a client's sound system driver for an updated Windows device. It had been challenging at first because his C++ programming skills were somewhat rusty from disuse, there had been some changes in the language a few years earlier, and it seemed like most of his projects required Python instead.

He had mastered C++ many years ago, and it had been quite a learning curve. Python, on the other hand, was simple by comparison. He dragged out his old C++ books and downloaded Borland's C++ compiler with the IDE and debugger. Between reviewing, relearning, and reprogramming the driver, he had been busy for two days. He went to bed exhausted at night, but only had one headache. The voice, on the other hand, disrupted him regularly, and he did his best to ignore it.

CHAPTER 9
Sunday, November 8

"Roy!" called Carole from the foot of the stairs. "Are you ready? We've got to leave for the barbecue."

"I'm on my way," he called back.

He finished saving his morning work and then shut down the computer. He grabbed his jacket and headed downstairs where Carole was waiting near the back door in the kitchen, holding a large plastic container. He could see that it was potato salad inside. She never went empty-handed to a barbecue, and today was no exception.

They walked to the end of the pasture fence and then cut through a small gate and across the damp grass, past three dozen or so black and white dairy cows. Carole didn't mind walking close to cows, even these 1,500-pound Holsteins. But Roy got his foot stepped on by a year-old, 900-pound Holstein calf when he was thirteen years old, and he had not forgotten the painful experience.

Johnny Nieman's cows were well-known in the area, but not for stepping on anyone's toes. He had a classifier come to his farm to evaluate his best producing cows, Starlight and Moonfire, and his best bulls, Jupiter and Rhodes. The classifier graded Star, Moon, and Jupiter as very good, and Rhodes as excellent. Since that time, Rhodes and Moon, in particular, had produced nine calves, all remaining on Johnny's farm, and Rhodes had also sired some of the finest bovines in Lewis County for other dairy farmers, many winning prizes at local fairs and at the annual, two-week, Washington State Fair in Puyallup.

Carole always loved going to the fair in Puyallup every September, and so did Roy. It really was an incredible fair. It was the largest in the state and in the Pacific Northwest. With more than one million visitors, it was also one of the biggest in the world. So, every year, they made the short trip and spent a day visiting the various pavilions, all the animals barns, and the cat show, which Carole especially loved.

After feasting on greasy-delicious fair chow, they ended the day with an evening concert. Last month they had seen Toto and Christopher Cross, and the year before that, they saw Foreigner, and the year before that they saw Chicago.

Roy opened a wider pasture gate that led to a path through the woods.

"I'm glad we've got such nice weather today," remarked Carole as they emerged from the mossy forest. The sky was cerulean, punctuated by a handful of puffy white clouds, and it was at least 60 degrees, warm for mid-fall.

They approached the Nieman's three large barns. It was barely noon on a Sunday, but farming was not a weekday-only job. Three young men, one of whom was Johnny's son Andrew, were cleaning out the free-stall barns, built so that the cows had plenty of room to move around and socialize with each other, and to eat and sleep where they chose. The barn floors were non-skid, cushioned surfaces designed for the comfort and safety of the animals, and Johnny was a strong proponent of keeping cows happy, his own in particular.

It had been proven time and again that reduced stress in cows increased their milk productivity, and Johnny was determined to sell the best milk in the greatest quantity that he could.

Roy and Carole walked uphill towards a putty-colored house with a wide wooden deck. They could see ten or more people gathered on the deck, and could hear the faint sound of someone singing and playing guitar.

They were too far away to recognize any familiar faces, and Roy was praying that Johnny hadn't invited his cousin and Roy's friend, Randy Hunter. He wasn't ready to face him after the embarrassing way he had behaved in his store just a week earlier. But then again, it was unlikely Randy would want to make the trip down from Tacoma, especially on a Sunday. Weekends were the only time when his store could actually be called busy.

As they came up the steps to the deck, Carole headed towards Dee Dee with her potluck dish and Roy looked around, relieved to find Bucky Jenson with a beer in one hand and his latest squeeze in the other.

"Hey Bucky, nice to see you," said Roy.

"Same here," replied Bucky. "This here's Brittany Hawes."

"Nice to meet you," said Roy.

"Nice to meet you too," said Brittany, in a low seductive voice that belied her appearance as barely legal.

She is soooooooo H-O-T! Man, would I like a piece of that!

Pain shot through his left eye and he tried not to show that anything was wrong. He didn't want to spoil the party. He quickly excused himself and went to find Carole.

"This is delicious, Carole," exclaimed Dee Dee. "I swear you make the best potato salad I've ever eaten."

"Thanks Dee Dee," she replied. "And I always love your bell pepper relish."

Roy walked into the kitchen to find the two women laughing and chatting as they prepared to bring the food out to the deck table.

"Well, hi there, Roy," smiled Dee Dee.

"Hi Dee Dee," he replied and then turned to his wife. "Do you have any of that aspirin?"

"Headache again?" she said, walking over to a chair and opening her purse.

"Here you go," she said, handing him two acetaminophen tablets as he filled a glass with water at the sink. "And it's acetaminophen, not aspirin."

"Hello, there, Roy," said a voice he recognized all too well.

"Hi Randy," said Roy, immediately feeling deeply embarrassed. "I'm really sorry about the way I acted the other day. I haven't been myself lately."

You're being yourself for the first time in your life!

Suddenly, Roy grabbed his head in both hands and crouched down on the floor, rocking himself back and forth. The pain in his eye continued as the room went spinning out of control. He could hear everyone around him talking as someone picked him up and led him into a bedroom and helped him onto a bed.

"Roy, can you hear me?"

"Uhm," muttered Roy.

"Roy," you need to open your eyes and look at me."

Roy slightly opened his eyes to see a young red-headed woman hovering next to him.

"Roy, I'm a nurse," she said. "My name is Amber Tomby. I'm Johnny's niece."

"Wh-where am I?" asked Roy, trying to raise himself into a sitting position on the bed.

"You're at the Nieman's house," explained Carole. "You had some kind of episode in the kitchen."

"Oh no … I'm sorry. That's all I seem to be lately. But I'm very sorry to everyone," said Roy. "I just need to go home."

CHAPTER 10
Monday, November 19

It had been two weeks and seven splitting headaches accompanied by the angry voices in his head. Roy was reluctant to talk about it with Carole as he was sure she would be terrified by the things the voice in his head was saying.

She had made an appointment for him with Dr. Voorhees for late that day, but she woke up with a cold or flu. He abruptly decided that he didn't want to go, but then realized that he should go anyway. He had to go. It wasn't just the pain in his eye or the voices. He was feeling so indecisive lately, unable to stick to anything, feeling at loose ends. He had even fallen behind on two small client jobs because he completely forgot about them. And that was not like him at all.

He had spent most of the morning in the milk room trying to decide if he should bury and later resurrect the remains of their cat Halo to preserve her skeleton. He found her next to the wood pile, an apparent victim of another animal.

He hadn't told Carole yet, and he didn't want her to see their beloved cat so badly mauled. He was crushed to see her mangled furry body himself. She had always been the sweetest of their four cats. But he knew Carole would want the little girl buried with a marker over her grave.

Roy had never been sentimental about dead bodies. He figured, whatever you were in life had already departed the body when you died. Ergo, the body wasn't really you at all, just the old biological house you lived in. But he was torn about whether he should preserve Halo's skeleton. He had to bury her either way.

Bury it, dig it up, she'll never know.

His head started throbbing and he could barely see out of his left eye.

"Stop talking. Stop talking. Stop talking!" he repeated, although he knew it was a useless plea. The voice in his head was relentless.

He buried Halo next to Sophie, Carole's old terrier mutt who died five years earlier. He told Carole what had happened to the cat, comforted her and wiped away her tears, tried to keep his own crying to a minimum, and then left to keep his 2:15 p.m. appointment with Dr. Voorhees.

"Do you have any idea what this might be?" Roy asked, his jaw tight and trying to prepare himself for the worst.

"I really can't say, Roy. You're perfectly healthy as far as I can tell," said Dr. Voorhees. "I'll contact you as soon as I get the results of your blood work, probably tomorrow."

CHAPTER 11
Friday, November 20

"If he hasn't called with the results by noon, you should call him," said Carole, trying to suppress a cough. "It's obvious that this is something fairly serious, don't you think?"

"I'll stop by his office on my way back from the grocery store," promised Roy.

It was raining when Roy left the Safeway store on Market Boulevard and followed the same street north to just past the intersection of Main Street in downtown Chehalis. It was 4:20 p.m. and the small lot in back was empty except for two cars. He parked and went in to face the music.

"Your blood work was all normal, although your cholesterol is still a little high. But nothing to account for the symptoms you've been having. It sounds to me like you're just suffering from stress, maybe not getting enough sleep. Your eye looks fine, but you should visit an ophthalmologist to make sure."

Stupid, stupid man! What he knows about medicine couldn't fill a thimble.

"Shut up," muttered Roy, trying to silence the voice in his head that had now been plaguing him daily.

"What was that?" asked Voorhees.

"Nothing," said Roy. "Just clearing my throat."

Nice save, Fingers. Now what are you gonna do about this idiot doctor?

A needle sharp pain pierced his left eye for the third time that day. Roy tried to ignore it as he walked towards the empty reception area. 

Kill the sucker. Save his other patients from dying before they get help.

"I'm not killing anyone," muttered Roy to himself as he ducked into the bathroom.

"I'm leaving now, Doc," called the receptionist. "We're all locked up."

"Thanks Cammie," came Dr. Voorhees' reply. "See you Monday."

Roy relieved himself and then walked down the hall to the front door. It was locked. He turned and walked back behind the reception area and down the hall to the back entrance that opened onto the small off-street parking lot where he'd left the Wrangler.

"Oh, you surprised me, Roy," said Dr. Voorhees, poking his head out the door into the hallway. "I thought everyone was gone."

"I stopped by the restroom. I'm on my way out now, Doc."

Now's the time. Never a better time. Rid the world of one more crappy doctor.

Voorhees stepped back into his office and Roy put his hand to his eye, although it didn't stop the sharp stabbing pain that he was, sadly, almost used to.

Come on Fingers! You can do it. Clean up the world. Be a hero!

Roy stepped out the back door and onto a small covered porch. It was dark out and he reached up into the light fixture and turned the bulb until the light went out. Within two minutes, Dr. Voorhees came down the hallway and opened the back door. He shut it behind him and then tapped on the darkened light fixture.

"Hmmph!" was the only sound the doctor had time to utter before something hard crashed into his head and he fell into a heap at the foot of the steps leading to the lot.

Roy ran to the Wrangler and fumbled with the keys as the adrenalin pumped throughout his body at high speed. He sped back south down Market Boulevard to Main Street, turned right, and followed Main – bouncing the car over the two sets of railroad track crossings without slowing down – until he passed the freeway and Main became State Route 6. He followed it south, his heart pounding and his head throbbing as his mind tried to rapidly sift through a tangled web of questions, beginning with Did I really kill Dr. Voorhees or did I just wound him? and ending with And if I didn't kill him will he know I tried to?

CHAPTER 12
Tuesday, November 24

Roy hadn't heard anything on the news or read anything in the paper about Dr. Voorhees. He debated again and again about making an anonymous phone call to the doctor's office to see what had happened, if anything. And he wasn't entirely sure that what happened really happened. Maybe it was all in his imagination. But then he would remember how he picked up the large rock from the planting bed and slammed it onto Voorhees' head. He remembered the sickening sound of the impact.

Despite the overwhelming guilt that now plagued his every waking hour, and despite the headaches, the pains in his eye, and voice in his head, Roy decided to press ahead with the building of his museum, to which he was also going to build a shop for Carol, although he wasn't sure what she might want to sell yet.

After securing all the necessary permits, his friend Matt, who now lived in Centralia, came over in  his Bobcat  and leveled an area on the lower field 110 yards from the main road, State Route 6. He had also sculpted out a level access road and a small area for parking. Bucky's retired uncle, who had experience with building roads, found a workforce to pave the areas and also to set a couple concrete foundation.

Today was the big day. The barns were finally relocated to their new foundations by a local building mover. It was while he, Matt, Bucky, and Matt's brother-in-law Sean were handling all of this, that Roy and Carole visited an ophthalmologist to see what might be going on with his eye. The stabbing pains weren't any worse, but they showed no signs of going away either.

"I can't believe you've been tolerating this for so long," said Dr. Samson.

"Can you tell what it is?" asked Carole.

"Is it serious? Do I need surgery?" asked Roy.

"I don't know," replied Dr. Samson. "I can see an irregularity in your eye, which I believe is being caused by what is probably a mass of some kind behind it."

"Oh no," whimpered Carole, and Roy reached over and held her hand.

"We can't jump to any conclusions about this," continued Dr. Samson. "But I recommend that you see a neurologist as soon as possible. I'd recommend Lionel Ishikawa. He used to work here at Providence Centralia Hospital and he has an excellent reputation. He's up in Seattle now at the UW Medical Center."

CHAPTER 13
Tuesday, December 1

Carole had researched Dr. Lionel Ishikawa and every other neurologist she could find in the state of Washington. Ishikawa was highly ranked by all accounts. He was a specialist in the surgical treatment of brain tumors, and an acknowledged expert in the use of microsurgical techniques to ensure maximal tumor removal. Unfortunately, all of this meant that he was fully booked four months out.

But Carole managed to wangle an earlier appointment after describing his history and symptoms to a sympathetic scheduler.

Meanwhile, Roy continued to have pain and voices taunting him. His outbursts had become more frequent as days and weeks went by, and so he shifted his attention away from the oddities in the milk room and onto computer services for his clients.

Setting up his shop in the barns by State Route 6 would have to wait.

His appointment was to begin at 10:00 a.m. He and Carole were up at 6 a.m. and fed the cats and dogs before they made the almost three-hour trip to the Neurology Clinic at the UW Medical Center on 115th Street in Seattle. Roy was already scheduled for an MRI and other scans and tests that morning before they met with Dr. Ishikawa later that afternoon.

"What is it?" asked Carole, when they sat down with the doctor. "He has these pains in his eye, terrible headaches, and he's ... he's hearing voices."

"I have reviewed your husband's medical records, Mrs. Arden," Dr. Ishikawa began, turning to Roy. "You're very healthy, and most of the tests back that up. But, the results of all your imaging tests – X-rays, CT scan, and MRI – indicate an odd-shaped mass behind your left eye."

"Is it cancerous?" asked Roy. "Can it be ... cured?"

"The scan reveals a tumor. It's not attached to your eye, which is good news. But what kind of tumor it is, exactly how it may be attached, and whether or not it's cancer – benign or malignant – we won't know until we get in there to remove it."

"So he can't just have chemotherapy to destroy it?" asked Carole.

"No, that's not an option at this time. But, after we remove it, if we find it's cancerous, then he may have to undergo chemotherapy to stop if from spreading," explained Ishikawa. "I'm going to review all your test results further with two of my colleagues, and then we can talk about how to proceed."

"When do you think that might be?" asked Roy.

"In the next day or two," said Ishikawa. "You'll receive a call from our surgical scheduler with details."

CHAPTER 14
Tuesday, December 8

The surgery was scheduled and Roy and Carole again made a trip to Seattle. Carole checked into the College Inn, a nearby hotel, and their furry friends were in the care of the Niemans for the time being. Roy's surgery was scheduled for 11:30 a.m., and he was still in the operating room until just before 4:30 p.m.

Carole had left the waiting room for a trip to the cafeteria to get coffee and lunch, and later she made a trip to the restroom. For awhile she sat reading a novel but then switched to crossword puzzles. It was hard to concentrate on anything because all she could think about was how Roy was doing. She couldn't bear the thought of losing him.

"I know it's been awhile," said Dr. Ishikawa, as he finally came into the waiting room and sat down beside Carole. "There was a delay in our start time. The surgery was a lot less complex than we anticipated, but we take our time. Surgery on the brain can never be rushed."

"So is he going to be all right?" she asked.

"We removed the tumor entirely and, as far as we can tell, he should expect a full recovery, said Ishikawa. "We'll see how he's doing once he's awake and we have the lab results."

Thursday, December 10

The lab results came in the following morning. But Roy was sedated and was not awake until the next day, at which time he was resting comfortably, and Carole was by his side.

"Your eye is black and blue,” she commented. “Are you in pain?"

"My neck is stiff and my eye and nose hurt where they had to make an incision and stitched it up," said Roy. "But I'm on painkillers, so other than that, I'm just tired."

Dr. Ishikawa knocked as he entered, and asked how his patient was feeling. He got the same response Roy gave to Carole.

"Was the tumor cancerous? Malignant?" asked Carole.

"It wasn't cancerous or malignant," said Ishikawa. "But it wasn't what we expected either."

"Why? What do you mean?" asked Roy.

"It appears to have been a fetiform teratoma, which is a ..."

"I know what a teratoma is," interrupted Roy.

"I see. Well, a fetiform one is a rare and very mature tumor, and not commonly found in the brain. But, we're not completely sure if that's what it was."

"What else could it be?" asked Carole, now relatively calm.

"It could just as easily have been a fetus in fetu, sometimes called a parasitic twin," said Ishikawa. "A fetus in fetu is different than a fetiform teratoma because it can have a spine and show signs of bilateral symmetry. And it is also very rare. And there is considerable controversy over whether there is such a thing as a parasitic twin. Many teratomas can be quite complex in their structure and can appear to be an undeveloped twin."

"Was it related to my extra fingers, toes …?"

"I doubt that it was related," began Ishikawa. "But like your extras, your tumor is considered to be congenital."

"Why is this happening now?" asked Roy.

"Probably because this type of tumor isn't usually diagnosed until adulthood, if it's diagnosed at all."
"So what do you think it was?" said Roy.

"In my opinion, it was a very complex, pure, fetiform teratoma that had the characteristics of a fetus in fetu," said Dr. Ishikawa."Some experts believe they're embryos that are lacking the biological programming that an embryo would normally have. From that point on, they just become a hodgepodge of body cells that grow and develop until they're eventually detected.

"Yours was behind your eye and had grown large enough to cause the surrounding brain tissue to impinge on the eye without affecting your vision. But it was big enough to impact on your brain's functioning, which was probably why you were hearing voices and having behavioral issues. Had it continued to grow, your other eye could have been severely impacted, causing vision problems. However, had none of your symptoms occurred, you may have lived with the tumor for the rest of your life and never even known it was there."

CHAPTER 15
Wednesday, January 6

Roy was released from the hospital four days following endoscopic transorbital surgery. He was glad they didn't have to crack his skull open. Instead they made an incision in the eyelid crease and then worked around the eyeball to access the tumor and remove it in pieces. While his eyelid incision and accompanying black eye were almost entirely healed within two weeks, he had headaches and pain in the area where the tumor once lived. The pain and headaches were to be expected as a result of the surgery. He hoped they would go away sooner rather than later.

But at least he was home. Carole watched over him, making sure he followed the doctor's aftercare instructions. She kept him hydrated, well-fed, and away from doing anything that was the least bit strenuous. Every morning after breakfast, she took him for a walk, as Dr. Ishikawa's instructions said this was the best form of light exercise for him during his recovery.

The good news was that he wasn't hearing voices. Even better news was that Dr. Voorhees was alive and well. He hadn't hit the doctor in the head at all. It was apparently some kind of delusion brought about by the tumor.

He woke up one morning and decided to go down to the milk room. He had been tested, he wasn’t hearing voices, he’d had surgery. Why not? The milk room was untouched since he’d last been there. It was a little dusty, but other than that, everything was just the way it was when he left it. He went to his work bench and turned on the light.

There it was, sitting on the table. The jar with the teratoma in it. He ignored it while he set a fire in the little heater. It needed to be cleaned out, and he removed some of the old ashes and then placed some fresh logs inside it. Patches had followed him down to the milk room and calmly slept next to the heater.

He sat down at the work table and looked carefully at the teratoma in the jar. It was silent. He put it on the shelf with his other oddities and returned to the work table to repair one of his older items that was not looking as well. He opened its jar and the smell of formaldehyde was overwhelming. He quickly replaced its old, leaky lid with a newer one. It fit perfectly, and he placed the jar back on the shelf. He opened a window to let in some fresh air, then closed it as soon as the smell was gone.

He sat down for a moment, wondering if he should again try to determine if the teratoma in the other jar was real. He saw it on the shelf and decided to give it another look.

He took it from the shelf and placed it on his work table where he could again examine it. He was afraid it would speak to him and he didn’t want that at all. So far, so good. It was silent. Or his brain was silent. He wasn’t sure if his own fetiform teratoma with characteristics of a fetus in fetu was completely gone. He didn’t do the surgery and was only trusting what Dr. Ishikawa had told him.

So are you convinced that I’m real?

Roy was horrified. It was the thing in the jar. Or, maybe it was in his head? He didn’t respond. He decided he would take it and bury it somewhere far away where it could never reach him again.

He thought about the field alongside the parking area for his museum. It wasn’t his land, but it was just a field of grass, and no one would ever find it there.
He put the teratoma back in it’s metal container and covered it with an old canvas bag. He grabbed a shovel from the barn, and he carried the box down the hill to the farthest end of the lot.

There he dug a hole next to a corner fence post, at least four feet deep, and buried it. He wanted to be sure he knew exactly where it was. Not because he ever intended to dig it up again. He just didn’t want to be harassed by it. He leaned on his shovel and quietly said, “You’re buried, the way you should have been all those years ago.”

He took his shovel and returned it to the barn, then went into the milk room to fetch Patches, and finally went back to the house. After dinner, Roy and Carole stayed up watching an old 1951 movie on TV, “The House on Telegraph Hill.” They had never been to San Francisco, but Roy was pretty sure that the house from the movie was still there.

“I think it was Julius’ Castle. A restaurant,” said Roy, knowing it didn’t really matter. But he looked it up on the Internet and found out it had been closed since 2007 and it had definitely been used in the movie, but with a lot of changes to the exterior.

“Come on, Roy,” said Carole. “Let’s go to bed.”

And he followed her to the bedroom where he promptly fell asleep.

CHAPTER 16
Sunday, January 10

The days passed quietly and slowly. It was now winter, and all of the once colorful trees were completely bare. The big trees, the firs, sequoias,  and redwoods, were of course, still fully green. Their yard was also without any of Carole’s beautiful flowers.

Roy hated to look at everything at this time of year. It was the one thing he didn’t like about living in Washington state. It had four seasons and he never liked this one. So far, no snow and no rain.

He hadn’t returned to the milk room. It was far too cold. All of the items for sale were now in the biggest barn down near State Route 6. His latest client gave him a second chance to get their job completed. And what else? He didn’t know. He was only interested in the latest project.

Roy diligently worked on his project for four days, and he anticipated it would take him an additional five to finish the job. Steadman and Harness had given him the job of creating their new computer system, including payroll, taxes, and a variety of other personnel needs. Roy wasn’t sure he could do it, but he thought about it for several days and finally decided that he knew what to do. He started work that afternoon.

Later in the day, he had a good start for the payroll system, and tomorrow he would be able to start adding what they needed.

He had almost finished his work for the day. But then the phone rang.

“Hello, is this Royland Arden?”

“Yes, this is Roy,” he replied.

“This is Hank Reynolds, Reynolds Construction. I’m calling about the land next to your new museum and store down on State Route 6. Our client, Mike Bridges, wants that lot cleared out.”

“I don’t know anyone named Mike Bridges,” said Roy, suddenly worried about the burial plot of his teratoma in a bottle. “Where does he live?”

“He lives out of town, and anyway, we’ll be starting work in a couple of days, and I thought we should let you know.”

“Oh, okay. Well, thank you,” said Roy.

He felt a wave of panic. He had buried the teratoma next to the fence in the parking lot. It was definitely not on his property. He was worried that it might be accidentally dug up, and he had plans to pave his parking lot. Steadman and Harness would have to wait.

Carole was off somewhere with Dee Dee Nieman. He went to the bedroom and changed quickly.  He headed out to the barn and took a shovel with him and headed for the museum/store. It wasn’t open yet, and he wasn’t sure if it would be open until Spring. The weather wasn’t that great right now and he didn’t have anyone around who could mind the place anyway.

When he got there, he headed for the post where he had buried the metal box. He dug several holes around the post and it wasn’t there.

Where the hell is that thing?

He tried a nearby post. Nothing there either.
Now he was scared. The teratoma was gone. He was certain it was somewhere near that corner post. Maybe it was another post. Maybe it was the one opposite the one where he was digging?

He headed to the other post and started digging, but the dirt there was hard. Too hard. No, it had to be where he was digging previously. He returned to the original post and dug deeper. Then deeper. Until finally he found the metal box wrapped in an old canvas bag. He breathed a sigh of relief. He had to move it inside the parking lot. He was going to have the area graded and covered in concrete come spring.

Where are we going, Roy?

It was talking to him. He was positive. It wasn’t the teratoma in his own head, it was the teratoma in the bottle, inside the metal box, wrapped in a canvas bag. It could still talk to him.

“Shut up!”

He knew it wouldn’t do any good. It would continue to talk to him. He ignored it and began another hole inside the parking lot.

You can bury me, but I can still talk to you.

Roy knew that was true. The voice was in his head and all that surgery was for nothing. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. His teratoma had made him say and do awful things. This one couldn’t harm him. All it could do was annoy him.

He made this hole even deeper, almost six feet deep. He dumped the box into the hole and it cracked.

No! Roy! Noooooooo!

He took his shovel and slammed it into the cracked jar. There was no sound. He slammed his shovel down again. And again, and again, and again. No sound. Had he killed it? That was a stupid thing to think since it was already long dead. But it wasn’t making a sound. He quickly shoveled the dirt into the hole, stomping it down as he went. He didn’t want to take any chance of it ever being dug up.

It was getting late in the afternoon, and he wasn’t in the mood to work on Steadman and Harness. Instead, he was going to work in the milk room, no matter how cold it was. He would set new wood in the Franklin stove and fire it up for the evening.

As usual, Patches followed him to the milk room. Roy saw to the stove immediately. The room warmed up right away and he began to go through his various oddities to try to determine what went in the museum and what went in the store.

“Well, you guys can go in the museum,” he said softly. “I’m sure you will get a lot of interesting looks from our visitors.”

He had sorted out everything in the room for display or for sale by 6:30 pm. He was pretty sure that he could move them to the museum and store the next day. He quieted the fire in the Franklin stove and called Patches to come with him to the house for dinner.

CHAPTER 17
Tuesday, January 12

"Roy, where’s that box of dishes and other things I got from Helen?”

Roy thought for a moment and then remembered where he’d seen it last. “I think it’s at the bottom of the hall closet,” he said.

No response. But he could hear Carole head to the closet, open the door, and start rummaging around. Everything was normal again. He put on his shoes and his heaviest jacket and headed for the mailbox. He wasn’t expecting anything, but he liked to take the daily walk to see what kind of junk mail he might be receiving.

As he walked down the lane, Patches by his side, he thought about how they used to receive so much more mail in the days before email caught on. Now, they only received junk mail and an occasional piece of mail from Carole’s elderly aunt.

He arrived at the box and opened it up. Only a few pieces of junk mail and a single letter, that being one from Castle Antiques. It was from Georgina Castle herself. He opened it and read it.

I realize this is probably not that important. But perhaps it might be. The granddaughter of the woman who owned the jar told me that her grandfather had died. She said that the teratoma had killed her grandfather. She said he was constantly trying to open the jar. Don’t know what this has to do with anything. But it was while he was trying to pry it open that he started having convulsions and that was how he died. This is probably just anecdotal information, but just in case, don’t try to open it!

Roy was shocked. The voice was real. Someone had already tried to stop it from talking to them and died. Georgina’s words echoed in his head. “Don’t try to open it!”

“I wish I had received this letter much earlier,” he said out loud to himself. “Like four months earlier. But that thing is dead now. Dead and gone.”

He and Patches walked quietly back to the house. Roy felt a sense of relief, something he hadn’t felt for months. He looked forward to a quiet lunch with Carole. No more talk about his extra toes and extra fingers and extra kidney. No more worries about what he could put up for sale in his new store. Just back to how life used to be before he encountered the oddity in the jar.

THE END