Dogra Magra (22/47)

by Hisashi Yumeno

In the dead of night, Dr. Wakabayashi, clad in black attire, stood before the corpse of a beautiful young girl. What thoughts swirled within his mind? Was he re-examining the cruel and bizarre circumstances surrounding her death, seeking to uncover the truth with his unique keen observational skills? Or was he captivated by her tragic beauty and profound charm, lost in a moment of ecstasy? No, such speculation would be disrespectful to his austere character. Let us not delve further.

At that moment, Dr. Wakabayashi suddenly came to his senses and looked around the classroom, which should have been empty. He plunged his hand into the right pocket of his black attire, searching for something. After a while, as if remembering, he approached the coffin and, from beneath the beautifully folded kimono, retrieved a black, trumpet-shaped tube about the size of a child's toy. This was an old stethoscope, superior to modern rubber-tube types for detecting subtle sounds within the human body. Dr. Wakabayashi placed one small end against the girl's left breast and pressed the other end to his ear from beneath his mask, listening intently.

To listen to the heartbeat of a corpse. What a strange act. It would make the observer's own heart pound with terror.

However, Dr. Wakabayashi showed no surprise. He removed the stethoscope from his ear, took out his pocket watch, and stared at it intently. He had indeed heard a heartbeat. This girl's body must still be alive. He recalled that when he had examined the girl's entire body earlier, he had found no faint blue lividity, a characteristic of post-mortem. Nor was there any sign of rigor mortis. This meant that the girl had not been dead before being placed in the coffin. There were clear ligature marks on her neck.

What an inexplicable event.

Dr. Wakabayashi showed no particular surprise, nodding contentedly as he looked down at the girl's figure again. Judging from his demeanor, he must have realized that she was in a medically rare state of suspended animation from the moment he first examined her body. Of course, that was after other doctors and police medical examiners had thoroughly examined her, but what points did he focus on to confirm that she was in suspended animation? And why did he pack this girl's body, in suspended animation, into a coffin and bring it into this room? Furthermore, what is the reason and purpose for him handling her body, in suspended animation, alone and in secret? There was no way to ask, but Dr. Wakabayashi must have thoroughly researched examples of suspended animation from all times and places. He must have confirmed for himself the reason why keeping the fact that this girl's body was in suspended animation a secret was necessary to solve this unprecedented mysterious case.

Not only that. It became clear that when Dr. Wakabayashi was lurking in the darkness, he quietly opened the coffin lid and applied his own stimulating methods to awaken this girl from her state of suspended animation, occasionally listening to her heart sounds with a stethoscope. The sound he made earlier, before he heard the clock and turned on the light, must have been the sound of closing the coffin lid. He must have left the stethoscope behind at that time as well. However, forgetting such important tools is an unexpected event given his usual composure. Dr. Wakabayashi tonight is certainly in a different psychological state than usual. How engrossed he was and how hard he struggled in the darkness to bring this girl back to this world can be fully inferred from this one fact alone.

However, just how exceptional Dr. Wakabayashi's skill is will become clear from now on. So far, it is merely the prologue.

Dr. Wakabayashi, noticing that the girl lying on the dissection table was gradually regaining consciousness from her state of suspended animation, removed his gloves with a tense expression. He plunged his hand into a round pocket beneath his dissection gown and began to pull out various items, arranging them on a wooden desk nearby. There were bottles of hair dye, a bamboo toothbrush, several new brushes, a small can of sumi ink, a compact containing rouge and lipstick, lotion, perfumed oil, cream, and powdered white foundation—all items quite out of place in such a room.

Furthermore, opening a brown paper package hidden at the back of a shelf near the entrance revealed a white cotton and flannel kimono with tubular sleeves, a cheap Hakata-ori obi, a Miyako-koshimaki, a white nurse's uniform and cap, a set of bandages, slippers, a nurse's cap, and hairpins—all new. These items had been prepared since daytime, perhaps intended to be put on the girl on the dissection table, but the reason for such an act was still unclear.

Next, Dr. Wakabayashi took out his stethoscope again and carefully checked the girl's heartbeat. Then, he retrieved a small brown bottle from the medicine cabinet across the room and, turning his face slightly away, dripped the colorless, transparent liquid inside onto a piece of absorbent cotton. He then brought it close to the girl's nose, which still had traces of white powder, while quietly taking her pulse with his left hand. He was administering an anesthetic. It seemed there was something he wished to avoid if the girl woke up too soon. However, with the girl anesthetized, what exactly the doctor intended to do remained unclear. Dr. Wakabayashi's actions seemed increasingly bizarre.

After finishing administering the anesthetic, Dr. Wakabayashi adjusted the girl's chest, then strode over to the medicine cabinet directly in front of him. He pulled out a Mino-style ledger that had been tucked away in a corner. On its cover, "Corpse Register... Kyushu University School of Medicine" was written in large characters. When opened, each page had "Corpse Number," "Date Received," "Recipient's Address and Name," "Date Delivered," and other details neatly filled in, with Wakabayashi's seal of approval stamped on it.

Dr. Wakabayashi flipped through nearly half of the ledger's pages, then pressed his finger on the second-to-last corpse number, "414," and container number, "7." He tossed the ledger onto a nearby desk. Then, he stretched out his long arm and switched off all four of the two-hundred-candlepower lights above his head.

The room was once again enveloped in darkness.

This darkness continued as if replacing the darkness of other rooms, but what kind of darkness awaits us...? [Fade to black]

...The film of darkness continued before my eyes... ten feet... fifteen feet... thirty feet... fifty feet... In the core of that darkness, a small, dirty yellow light bulb eventually flickered on. There, the gloomy scene of a room, as if viewed through a keyhole, appeared.

...Everyone, have you ever seen a room like this?

The dark concrete stairs visible on the right indicate that this room is a basement. The dozen or so large, white-painted drawers lined up in front are all corpse containers. In other words, this room is a corpse refrigeration room under the responsible management of the Dean of the Kyushu University School of Medicine. It maintains a temperature so low that it makes one's skin crawl even on a midsummer day, but especially now in the dead of night, its eerie silence is such that one could almost hear the breathing of the dead.

Dr. Wakabayashi, the head of the medical department, who appeared on the scene, seemed to be struck by the cold air and coughed painfully for a while. Eventually, he suppressed it, took a master key from his pocket, and unlocked the sturdy padlock attached to the corpse container numbered "7". Then, he noisily pulled out the robust wheeled container, and without a moment's rest, he leaned his upper body and carefully lowered the rigid, bandaged body of a girl onto the floor. The corpse had a dark, ugly face, completely unlike the girl in suspended animation from earlier, but her age, height, build, and hairline seemed to be similar.

Dr. Wakabayashi seemed to have had his eye on this corpse for a while; without much examination or hesitation, he returned the container to its original place, locked the padlock, and then hoisted the corpse like a piece of lumber. He ascended the concrete stairs step by step, and with one hand, he flipped the switch on the wall, turning off the basement lights. [Fade to black]

Here, too, the scene remains dark for a while, but... listen to that tremendous barking of dogs...

It was a scene where wild dogs, having spotted Dr. Wakabayashi's strange figure carrying a corpse while avoiding human eyes in the darkness of the pine forest behind the current morgue and forensic medicine classroom, barked furiously from their nearby experimental animal cages. Around them, the screams of monkeys echoed madly, and even the leisurely sheep and chickens awoke, raising their voices to their limits. The commotion in the darkness was terrifying, but since such animal disturbances were almost a nightly occurrence, no one found it suspicious. Moreover, who could imagine the unprecedented fact that a dignified dean of the university's medical faculty would secretly steal a corpse under his own responsibility? The darkness of a spring night at Kyushu Imperial University only grew quieter amidst the screams and cries of the animals.

Eventually, the sounds gradually faded, and just as silence seemed to return, four 200-candlepower electric lights suddenly turned on, and the scene returned to the forensic dissection table as before.

Upon seeing it, the rigid corpse of girl number 414 lay on the concrete floor. Meanwhile, Dr. Wakabayashi, having securely locked the entrance door, stood motionless before the dissection table, wiping sweat from beneath his black mask and breathing heavily.

On the night of April 27, Taisho 15 (1926), two bodies of young girls were thus laid out side by side in the dissection room of the Kyushu University School of Medicine. One was a girl beautifully on the verge of revival, the other a girl rigidly stiffened in an unsightly manner. Among them, the body of the girl laid on the dissection table with a red Yuzen cloth beneath her had remarkably regained her complexion in just a short time, and it was evident that she had begun to breathe faintly while still under anesthesia. The rise and fall of her ample chest were visible. Her abnormal peacefulness and sensuality contrasted with the ugly face of the girl beneath the table, making her beauty stand out even more, almost to the point of being eerie.

Dr. Wakabayashi, taking a pulse, began to check the effects of the anesthetic, staring intently at the second hand of his watch. As the doctor's dark figure became still as a stone statue, with his head slightly tilted, the emptiness of the room filled with an indescribable silence, like a tomb a thousand feet underground.

Eventually, Dr. Wakabayashi released the girl's hand, which he had been taking the pulse of, and put his watch back into his pocket. He then gently lifted the girl's body and laid her on the lid of the coffin in the corner of the room. In her place, he lifted the rigid corpse of girl number 414 onto the dissection table and placed an old, concave wooden pillow under her head. Taking a large silver pair of scissors, he began to cut open the bandages wrapped around her entire body, one after another. Then, various sizes of scars, inflicted both vertically and horizontally, appeared on the girl's bluish-black skin, from her back to her chest, and from her chest to her groin. The marks of beatings, brandings, and abrasions, appearing as brown, black, and dark purple lines and curves, along with prominent lividity on her lower back, were illuminated under the brilliant white light. It was as if snakes, lizards, and toads of those very colors and shapes were about to crawl across her skin.

This type of corpse is often brought to universities and vocational schools nationwide for research dissection. Particularly at Kyushu University, many cases involve those from the numerous coal mines and textile factories in the region, as well as those abducted and abused in dens of iniquity, suicides, and vagrants. It is not uncommon for some to have no one to claim them. Kyushu University dissects such bodies as research material, cremates them at the university's crematorium, turns them into bones, and hands them over to the bereaved family with a five-yen condolence gift. Those without claimants are buried in a communal grave, and an annual memorial service is held for them, so this corpse is also thought to be one of those cases.

After quickly examining the entire body, Dr. Wakabayashi let out another sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from his face through his mask. Soon, he approached the washbasin in the corner of the room, drank water directly from the tap, and, choking, regulated his breathing, taking a moment to compose himself. For the doctor, who had suffered from chronic lung disease for many years and was increasingly frail, such strenuous work must have been incredibly difficult and taxing on his body.

However, the doctor's bizarre work was not even halfway complete.

Soon, Dr. Wakabayashi returned from the washbasin. First, he placed a bowl at the feet of the corpse, inserted a hose from the attached tap into it, and began to run water over the dissection table from the corpse's legs up to its back. Next, he filled another bowl with warm water and, using a sponge and soap, carefully washed and cleaned the massacred body of the girl on the dissection table. Furthermore, he wiped her entire skin dry with gauze and absorbent cotton, parted her poor reddish-brown hair down the middle, and, taking a shining scalpel in hand, plunged it into the corpse's glabella. Then, he proceeded to cut open the scalp in a straight line, gradually extending to the back of the head.

At this point, those with some knowledge in this field might exclaim, "Oh!" This is because Dr. Wakabayashi's method disregarded the usual autopsy procedure, which starts with the chest and abdomen, then the head, and finally the back, by beginning with the head.

Dr. Wakabayashi was known as a renowned forensic pathologist, but his actions tonight were astonishing to everyone. Before one could even wonder what his purpose was in beginning to wield the scalpel with such a haphazard procedure, the girl's scalp was skillfully turned inside out and, along with her hair, was peeled back as if removing a sock, all the way down to below her eyes.

From beneath it, a white bald head appeared, which Dr. Wakabayashi sawed off like a headband. Then, he skillfully used an instrument to remove the exposed brain onto a glass dish. Just as I wondered what he was thinking, he, to my surprise, indifferently flipped the brain in the air as if handling a steak or an omelet, and put it back into the skull. His manner of covering the scalp and hair back in place and crudely stitching it with needle and thread was almost mechanical.

This was astonishing. Dr. Wakabayashi was known as a strict and righteous man, so why was he performing such a dishonest autopsy tonight of all nights? As I harbored doubts, the corpse was again rolled over onto its stomach. Then, in the center of its scarred back, the spinal muscles were roughly cut open with a saw. Dr. Wakabayashi used a two-pronged saw to remove the ribs on both sides and cut the spine vertically in half, but he returned it to its original position with hardly any examination and crudely stitched it up with a thick needle. The roughness of his technique seemed the same as before.

Next, Dr. Wakabayashi again turned the corpse onto its back, washed away the soiled parts, and then proceeded to check the thickness of the abdominal skin. Taking a new scalpel, he made a single thrust into the pharynx. He cut from between the breasts down to the epigastric region, rotated half a turn to the left at the navel, and cut down to the pubic bone in one breath, then removed the costal cartilage and sternum. Skillfully moving both hands, he opened the chest wall down to the abdominal wall. With that single cut, the abdominal wall and peritoneum were simultaneously opened, and there was no damage whatsoever to the internal organs. The five viscera and six entrails were neatly arranged, emitting a pale light, which was both eerie and terrifying.

The black stains visible on one side of her lungs indicated that this girl had worked in a coal mine, and the ruptured liver and internal bleeding, the fatal cause, proved the intensity of the abuse she had suffered. However, Dr. Wakabayashi paid no attention to such things, indiscriminately rotating and disturbing her internal organs. Finally, after formally cutting open her stomach, intestines, and bladder, he did not even take samples of parts of each organ as in a normal autopsy. Instead, he again took up a thick needle and hemp thread and began sewing her up from the lower abdomen to the pharynx. The handling of the knife during this process was brutal and incisive, and the use of the needle and thread was astonishingly skillful and swift.

An unbearable sense of satisfaction permeated his movements and demeanor. It seemed as if some profound desire was being fulfilled by this work. Those who observed Dr. Wakabayashi noticed that his usual composure had vanished, and he had transformed into an energetic person driven by a cruel and intense interest, as if he were a different person.

However, this was by no means a strange phenomenon. From ancient times, there have been many instances where masters of a certain craft or experts in a skill, so engrossed in their work, are driven by abnormal excitement and act beyond common sense. For a person with a unique constitution and intellect like Dr. Wakabayashi, after completing an unprecedented undertaking—the mystical work of resuscitating the seemingly dead body of a beautiful girl—to now embark on the unusual task of carelessly handling the brutally murdered corpse of a girl, it would be unimaginable for an ordinary person to comprehend how heightened his nerves must be and how his psychology must have changed.

After Dr. Wakabayashi finished suturing the girl's thoracoabdominal region up to her pharynx, he finally took up a particularly sharp small scalpel and turned towards the girl's face.