*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79851 ***




                              Faith Killer

                            by Winston Marks




“Watch this next curve,” the old doctor told him. “We call it, ‘Hell
Bend’. It consigns more souls to the other world than any spot on this
highway.”

Dr. Reed Fassin took the dangerous hairpin turn fast and expertly,
disdaining to glance down the thousand-foot drop-off to his left. At
38, Dr. Fassin needed no advice on his driving. He knew his car, his
reflexes and the laws of motion as surely as he knew his profession. It
was all a matter of hard physics, intelligence and applied reason.

As the rubber stopped squealing and the sleek convertible lurched
back from its tortured springs, Fassin resumed their debate. “It’s
preposterous to tolerate the woman,” he said flatly. “Preposterous and
unprofessional.”

Dr. Coffey, older and white-haired, relinquished his grip on the door
handle and tried to relax. “Sorry I mentioned it if it disturbs you,”
he said softly.

“Faith healers are common enough,” Fassin said, “and I grant that they
thrive on persecution. But a healer who practices witchcraft openly is
dangerous. That’s carrying the power of suggestion too far.”

Dr. Coffey raised his eyebrows in amusement. “Then you agree that they
do have a positive power?”

“They dispense placebos,” Fassin replied. “You know that as well as I
do. Mental placebos, direct suggestions of improvement. A desperate
patient will seize on any hope, believe any lie. These witchcraft
devices verge on hypnotic therapy, and that stuff is tricky even in
professional hands. What’s worse, it breeds superstition in the place
of sensible, scientific attitudes toward medical treatment.

“You’ll rue the day if you condone such a practice in your area, Dr.
Coffey.”

“My dear boy, I don’t condone, sanction or condemn it. I am merely
fascinated with some of her results. This past year I’ve seen four of
my own cases with inoperable cancer live long, long past their due
dates, and in relative painlessness. She treated them.”

Fassin compressed his lips in a cold smile and withheld his retort.
Coffey was getting old, and it was not unheard of that non-malignant
tumors were confused with carcinoma. Yet, it wouldn’t have been polite
to mention the possibility of mis-diagnosis. He shrugged. “They are
your patients, and you’ll have to cope with their attitudes.”

“They’re my people, and I hate to see them suffer.” Coffee said mildly
and dropped the subject.

The mountain road wound down into the valley town, and the old man was
deposited at his clinic. “Thank you kindly for the transportation,”
Coffey said.

“Not at all, doctor. Hardly out of my way at all, and I always enjoy
these conversations with my senior colleagues,” Fassin lied. Had he
known that the conversation would have degenerated to faith-healing
he would never have volunteered to spare Coffey the tiring train
trip returning from the medical convention. The detour had required
a dead-end round-trip through the mountains before he rejoined the
highway to his own city.

“If you take my advice, though, you’ll get the local board of health to
crack-down on this female meddler.”

Coffey waved him on with a laugh, and Fassin drove on up the main
street to the next intersection, where he intended to turn around.
The traffic light halted him, and as he waited a long cue of people
drew his attention to a ramshackle store-front with a huge, unwashed
plate-glass display window. Over the entrance was a long, frayed banner
of cracked oilcloth. In bold, red letters was the unapologetic legend:

    “FAITH HEALER.”

The pause for the green light was irritatingly long, and Fassin’s
curiosity had too long to generate. When the “go” signal flashed he
wheeled his vehicle over to the curb and got out to investigate the
burden which old Dr. Coffey had to bear.

The line contained some thirty people including several in wheelchairs,
and threaded its way inside to a sizable room stripped bare of fixtures
except for a table, one chair and one long shelf.

Fassin shouldered his way inside and gained a clear view of the
proceedings. A “patient” was just leaving with a placid expression on
her lined, aged face. The “healer”, a stocky woman in her fifties, was
most unimposing in a cotton print dress with large pockets. Into one
of these she dropped a bill as Fassin watched. She was dark, almost
gypsy-dark, and she wore her black-dyed hair straight, pulled back to
an ugly bun at the base of her skull.

She said, “Hinckel, the basin.” A door in the back partition opened,
and a boy of ten came in with an enameled white pan of water in which
she washed her hands. It smelled of phenol.

The next patient, a middle-aged man, lean of face and pot-bellied, took
his place in the chair with his back to the healer. His scrawny hands
lowered his grotesquely distended belly to his lap. Obviously a late
stage of dropsy, Fassin diagnosed silently. Advanced edema. The man
needed tapping, if possible. If not, he was beyond hope.

The healer dried her hands, and without a word began stroking the
patient’s forehead. Her face was square, gray and emotionless,
straight-lipped and flat-nosed--no wonder she had her patient’s face
away from her.

Her wrinkled fingers were dark and strong, and the man’s face relaxed
under the manipulation. At length the woman spoke. “You are very ill. I
can feel it in my hands. You must cooperate.”

“I will,” the man said, his eyes frightened.

The woman called out to the boy again, “The wax, Hinckel.” The
dark-eyed little boy came in again, hands cupped over a shapeless mass,
and the odor of hot paraffin came to Fassin’s nostrils.

She took the soft glob in her left hand, held it near the base of the
man’s skull and snipped a bit of his brown hair with a pair of child’s
blunt-nose scissors. Then she kneaded the hair into the wax and quickly
shaped it into the crude image of a man.

Holding it before the man she said, “Your condition can kill you if you
fail to cooperate. Have faith in me, and you will be better. Behold
your image which I hold in my hand. It contains a part of you. It
_is_ you. I hold your health in my hands like I hold this doll.”

She took a pin from the collar of her dress. “See, I am about to prick
you, and you will feel it.” She stabbed the wax doll lightly in the
neck, and the man jerked hard, grabbed a corresponding area of his neck
and grimaced.

Next, she poked a fingernail at the doll’s fat belly, and the sick man
doubled over. She said, “This is not your real trouble. The sickness is
up here.” She set the doll on the table and returned to massaging his
head and neck.

Fassin was appalled at the raw, unashamed emotions that washed
successively over the man’s pained face. Now there was repose and
trust, again.

The woman’s voice was flat and ordinary as she droned on. “You are
mortal, and I cannot cure you of that. Some day you will die, like all
of us, but now you will live. You will feel better each day that you
return to me, for I have your life in my hands now, and my hands know
the truth.”

She dropped her arms. “Come back to me tomorrow.” She set the little
image on the shelf behind her, and when she turned, the man was holding
out two one-dollar bills. She took them without comment.

Fassin stepped forward as the woman called for the wash basin. At least
she went through the motions of sanitation, Fassin reflected, as the
smell of carbolic acid drifted from the pan of steaming water once more.

The doctor intercepted the man patient near the door. “Are you under a
doctor’s care?” Fassin demanded abruptly.

The man stared at the well-dressed physician from head to foot and
shook his head slowly. “Not any more. They give me no hope--just big
bills.”

Fassin took the man’s listless wrist and felt of the flaccid tissues of
his arm. “You had better see Dr. Coffey this afternoon,” he said, “if
you value your----”

The man snatched his arm away. “I left a whole hospital full of doctors
two days ago and drove 600 miles to come here. Now I feel better. If
you are a doctor you had better take some lessons from her.” He hooked
his thumb over his shoulder and waddled by Fassin with a scowl.

A cold fury seized the physician. “Fool!” he called after the condemned
man, who ignored him and disappeared. Fassin turned to glare at the
healer. She regarded him frigidly with arms relaxed at her lumpy hips.
Her voice quivered.

“Go back to your broken bones and your chickenpox,” she said. “Doctors
are not welcome here. Not your kind.”

Fassin moved to the long shelf behind her. Several hundred wax effigies
stood unlabelled in uneven rows, one indistinguishable from the others.
Enough patients were represented there to keep Dr. Coffey in a most
comfortable practice. As it was, he knew, Coffey was scraping along on
a bare subsistence level.

His anger mounted, and he whirled to face the line of gullible
sufferers waiting to be mulcted. Their eyes were large and staring and
shocked at his intrusion.

“This woman is a murderer,” he declared loudly, “and you are her
victims.”

Silence in the room made the muffled street sounds seem harsh and
vulgar. The healer stood motionless now, looking straight before her.

“Some of you,” Fassin continued, “could live long, useful lives if
you remained in charge of a physician. Others of you will die soon
regardless of this despicable fraud’s fairy tales. The only thing she
relieves you of is your money. Save it, or spend it on whiskey. That
will make you feel better, too.”

He knew he was making a spectacle of himself, and the knowledge added
fuel to his anger. He stepped to the end of the shelf and walked its
length, arm extended, sweeping the fragile images to the stained floor
where they broke. Heads and torsos rolled about grotesquely.

He cried, “If you want peace of mind go to church, or better yet, go to
a psychiatrist. This stupid woman can only----”

He had turned to face the patients, and the look of horror on several
faces stopped him. A woman, then three men rolled up their eyes and
fainted to the floor with heavy thumps.

The healer pushed Fassin aside and went to them muttering, “You may
have killed them. To see one’s image destroyed can be fatal.”

It had been an unwise act, and suddenly Fassin rushed from the hateful
place in chagrin. As he pushed the crowd aside he heard the healer’s
voice shrill a command. “Hinckel, come here!” He lost the rest of it
in the angry muttering that followed him, but the boy emerged from the
door saying, “Yes, mam. The right front.”

Fassin got in his car, jabbed the starter button and was reaching for
the shift lever when he noticed Hinckel, the healer’s boy helper,
bending over beside the hood. The physician slid across the seat and
stuck his head out. The boy had a razor and was sawing at the tread of
the tire.

“You, stop that!” Fassin leaped from the car, but the lad escaped.
The doctor kneeled to examine his tire. It was a new, white sidewall
with the treads hardly marked with wear, so it was easy to find where
Hinckel had snicked an inch-long sliver of rubber from the rim of the
tread. It was a mere shaving, and Fassin went over the rest of the tire
for several minutes to be sure the boy hadn’t slashed the vulnerable
sidewall or loosened the valve cap.

One of the penalties of driving fast was the expense and meticulous
attention one must give his vehicle, especially the tires. Fassin took
no chances on his rubber. He always bought expensive brands, insisting
on safety tubes and extra heavy treads. It had paid off in a perfect,
non-blowout record.

Satisfied that he had frightened the boy away in time, he got in,
performed an illegal U-turn and sped from the little city.

Coffey was more than welcome to his precious faith healer and his
starvation practice. Thank heaven, his own post as resident surgeon
insulated him from such incidents as this.

As his high-powered car climbed the smooth ribbon of pavement into
the hills, his anger subsided, and he reflected upon the utter
irrationality of people. He was under no illusion that he had helped
Dr. Coffey or harmed the healer’s practice. The gullible would have
their way if it cost them their lives.

How different this was from the sanity and precision of his own
surgical practice where facts and skills yielded predictable and
substantial fees. His colleagues would laugh over his incredible tale
of back-woods superstition.

The yellow and black caution sign warned of his approach to “Hell
Bend,” and something made him ease off on the throttle as an
approaching car made him take the outside lane only two feet from the
sheer cliff’s edge. He wondered if he had examined that tire closely
enough, and that made him wonder what had been the boy’s purpose in
slicing the scrap of rubber from the tread like that.

He remembered the little wax effigies, and then the tire business made
sense. The woman must believe her own nonsense. Probably that scrap of
rubber was imbedded in a hunk of wax right now. And the hunk of wax
would be a lumpy image of his automobile, since she had been unable
to get a scrap of his hair or a fingernail paring for her vengeful
purposes.

He chuckled at the thought. Now if anything went wrong on this trip
home he’d never be able to shake the incident from his mind.

Funny thing about superstition. Even the completely rational mind
insisted on attaching absurd significances to entirely disconnected
occurrences. Here he was, Dr. Reed Fassin, a scientist, sitting tensely
behind the wheel of a perfectly safe vehicle in top condition, slowing
down to 20 miles per hour just because of old Dr. Coffey’s warning
about all the souls dispatched on this curve--and because of the
missing sliver of rubber.

Deliberately he relaxed and tromped hard on the accelerator. The
convertible squatted and dug around the hairpin, scattering gravel
from the shoulder down into the thousand-foot chasm to his right.
Nervelessly, he rode out the high speed skid and bore into the next
easy curve and the next with increasing velocity. Nothing had happened,
and why should it? He knew his car, his reflexes and his tires.

He was still chuckling when the right front tire exploded and snatched
the wheel from his relaxed grasp. His lightning response caught the
wheel and wrestled the car back from the very brink, but the light
guard rail peeled up over the slanting hood, pierced the windshield and
skewered Dr. Fassin’s handsome skull as easily as poking a pin into a
soft wax doll.




Transcriber’s Note:


  This etext was produced from Tales of the Frightened, Spring 1957
  (vol. 1, no. 1). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
  the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but
  minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.

  New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
  public domain.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79851 ***