Great Australian Ghost Stories by Richard Davis

Author:Richard Davis [Davis, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Fiction
ISBN: 9780733331077
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

19.

The Ghost in the Machine

There are two gates of sleep, one of which it is held is made of horn and by it easy egress is given to real ghosts. The other shining, fashioned of gleaming white ivory, but the shades send deceptive visions that way to the light.

Virgil (Roman poet, 70BC – 19BC)

Most doctors (like other practitioners of the sciences) are sceptical about things supernatural. An exception is Dr Chloe Hill — and, no, that’s not the good doctor’s real name. As her remarkable story unfolds you will understand why a pseudonym had to be used to preserve her anonymity and her reputation.

Chloe is currently doing her internship at a Sydney public hospital and hopes to set up in private practice in a year or two, but her story begins when she was still a student in the autumn of 2010. The school of medicine Chloe attended offered dissection of human cadavers as an elective component in the medical degree course and Chloe, like most of her fellow students, opted for it, believing that exposure to a real body would be more beneficial than studying plastic models or computerised images.

The cadaver allotted to Chloe to work on was that of a middle-aged man who had bequeathed his body to medical science. The man was overweight and had succumbed to a massive heart attack, so the external parts of his body were untouched, but large flaps of fatty tissue had to be divided and clamped back before Chloe could begin work on his internal organs.

Chloe worked quickly and deftly, all the while trying not to let her gaze wander onto the cadaver’s face. A short, thick, grey-streaked beard that looked more like steel wool than human hair framed the lower part of the face in sharp contrast to the upper part which was hairless — no eyelashes, no eyebrows and a smooth, shiny scalp. This curious arrangement made the cadaver’s head look as if it was attached to its body upside down. That might have struck your average medical student as comical, but a twisted mouth and tiny, pig-like eyes gave the face a sinister cast, as though cruelty in life somehow lingered on in death.

After removing all the cadaver’s abdominal organs and laying them out on stainless steel trays, Chloe reached for her laptop and began making detailed notes of her observations. Apart from the cadaver’s face, which continued to trouble her, Chloe found the whole exercise exhilarating and engrossing. The professor of anatomy who was supervising came by and questioned Chloe about the condition of the cadaver’s heart, praising the acute observations she had made about it. Time passed quickly and in what seemed much less than the four hours the clock on the wall of the dissecting room indicated, Chloe was removing her surgical gown and mask and cleaning herself up in the scrubbing room.

That evening Chloe’s boyfriend Reece took her to a Thai restaurant for dinner. During the meal Chloe regaled Reece with all the details of her morning’s anatomical adventure.

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