Characters in Autopsy Room Four

Originally taken from a Maine state driver’s license. Pronouncing doctor was, um, Frank Jennings. Subject was pronounced at the scene.” Now it’s my nose that I’m hoping will bleed. Please, I tell it, bleed. Only don’t just bleed. GUSH. It doesn’t.

“When you’re on your own, Petie-boy, you can do what you want. But in Katie Arlen’s autopsy room, you start off with the pericardial shears.” Autopsy room. There. It’s out. I want to be all over goose-bumps, but of course, nothing happens; my flesh remains smooth.

“Attending physician?” the lady doc asks. “Was it Kazalian?” “No,” Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me. Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray in it. Spectacles.

“His name is Howard Randolph Cottrell, residence is 1566 Laurel Crest Lane, here in Derry.” Dr. Arlen, at some distance: “Mary Mead.” A pause, then Pete again, sounding just a tiny bit flustered: “Dr.

… toxin in my blood-stream—the same toxin found to a far lesser degree in orderly Mike Hopper’s bloodstream—was documented but never identified. I have looked at a great many pictures of snakes in the last year, and have found at least one which has reportedly caused cases of full-body paralysis …

“Why do I always get the jerks, Peter?” “I don’t know,” Mr. Melrose Place says, “but Rusty’s a special case, even in the annals of famous jerks. Walking brain death.” She laughs, and something clanks.

Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be Rusty. He’s wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-school grin, the grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading BORN TO SNAP BRA-STRAPS on one wasted bicep. “Michael!”

That house belonged to a bachelor bank clerk named Walter Kerr. Police found the house empty . . . of human life, that is. In the basement they found over sixty snakes of different varieties.