Autopsy of a Hunter (a Gooweny-Ein story)

Dr. Bedi cleaned his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He’d love to be tucked in his bed next to his wife right now, but Sargent Aziz had asked him to come in early as a special favour. Apparently, there was an “odd” case that needed urgent attention.

Bedi looked through the tiny breakroom window. He could see blue poking through the night sky. It could be the first sign of sunrise, or it might just be light pollution. It was too early, at any rate. Sargent Aziz would owe him one.

With one final sip of his coffee, it was time for Bedi to get to work. He went into his “office” as he liked to call it - never mind the plaque on the door that read “morgue”.

The guest of honour that the Sargent had made such a fuss over was already there, ready for his autopsy. The guy didn’t have much of a file yet. Still, Bedi quickly glanced over what information he had.

From what Bedi could gather, the deceased was an investment banker who worked in a skyscraper out on Bloor Street. The man was also an avid hunter —a weekend warrior —going on multiple remote trips with his friends every year—the type you need to fly in and out of.

He was found deceased in his apartment by police after the neighbours reported hearing gunshots. Apparently, the man had been living like a recluse and acting “strangely” for nearly five months.

He was found with injuries to his head, as well as injuries to his chest and eyes that the Sargent was particularly interested in. Apparently, those wounds were what made this case so strange.

Well, it was Bedi’s job to look at those injuries and find out what killed this guy.

Bedi washed his arms with the abrasive soap that made his hands feel all nice and smooth, donned his PPE, and grabbed his voice recorder.

“Autopsy started at” Dr. Bedi checked his watch, “5:56 am. Deceased is Hugo Leveque, male, appears to be of European descent, age sixty-four.”

Bedi turned off his recording. “Poor fellow, you didn’t even make it to retirement.” He said with a sigh as he looked at the corpse, which was missing part of the top of his head. That made it an easy candidate for ‘most probable cause of death’.

It wasn’t the only potentially fatal wound, though. The body had also already been vivisected right down the middle, as if someone had already started the autopsy. His eyes were missing, too.

Bedi was starting to understand why the Sargent had found this case so unnerving, and why he had been so anxious for answers. People didn’t usually cut themselves open like this. But maybe this wasn’t the wound the Sargent had talked about; perhaps someone else had started an autopsy, and Bedi was just being called in to finish up. It certainly looked that way…

“Hey Nina!” Bedi called out to the only other person working in that part of the hospital. Nina was a lab tech who worked in forensics. She’d been called in to run some samples from the same case.

Nina was a lovely woman, Bedi got along well with her, but he always thought she looked like a mouse whenever she poked her head into a room. It was a combination of her beady eyes, thin features, and the way she clasped her hands and looked around so timidly. “Yes, Aarav?” She said.

“No one else has started examining Mr. Levesque, right?”
“No, he was brought in like that.”

“Hmm…strange,” Bedi said as much to himself as to his coworker.

When it became clear he had nothing more to ask, she closed the door and returned to her own duties, leaving him alone with the corpse.

Bedi turned on the voice recorder in his blue latex gloves, examining the body's exterior closely.

Rigor Mortis had just started to set in, while vitals from the medics indicated Algor Mortis was already underway. Pallor Mortis was complete. That all suggested death had probably been maybe two or three hours ago. That lined up with when the police indicated the neighbours had heard gunshots…

Gunshots, Bedi mouthed, examining the head wound. It didn’t look like the deceased had shot himself twice, but maybe he’d missed the first time, or fired a practice one.

Your job is to find out what has happened to the body, not how many shots were fired around him, he reminded himself, refocusing on the corpse before him.

A quick inspection of the deceased's nails revealed that they’d been worn and broken, as if the man had been digging into something. Bedi pulled out a magnifying glass; beneath the nail, there was dark brown detritus. Grabbing his tweezers, he pulled it out and looked at it under a microscope. Wood. Hardwood – maybe from a floor? It seemed like the man might have tried to dig or break through something, or was dragged, and was trying to cling to something for dear life. Bedi added his observations to his voice recording.

Then Bedi inspected the cuts around Mr. Levesque’s eyeless orbits. They’d been made proficiently by…something, Bedi couldn’t identify what. Strangely, they were healed, leaving behind shiny red scars that looked about six months old.

So, half a year ago, the man had violently lost both eyes, and now he was dead under odd circumstances. Hmmm.

Something about the timeline jarred Bedi’s memory. He quickly flipped through the medical records, anxious to check his hunch.

Yes! Back in July, Mr. Leveque had been airlifted to a hospital in Edmonton. The file had no details on what injuries the man had sustained beyond a vague “face injury” – Bedi would need to get more information from the Alberta Health Services – but it did state he had been on a hunting trip to Nahanni National Park. Oh dear! It appeared he’d been the only survivor on a group trip. According to the ranger reports, there was a suspected polar bear attack.
Odd, Bedi thought. The scars didn’t look like they came from a polar bear claw. They looked like a person had plunged a saw or something into each socket.

Bedi looked for more medical notes, but from the looks of things, Mr. Leveque declined any further follow-up.

“So,” Bedi said, looking at the corpse with compassion, “you’ve had a rough year.” Bedi could see the odds and ends of Mr. Leveque’s story coming together. The man was alone, traumatized, potentially living with survivor’s guilt…but it was too early to reach conclusions. He needed to keep examining.

The gunshot wound occurred around the same time as death. It started at the back of the pallet, then went up through the brainstem, taking out large portions of the cerebellum and the occipital lobe, as well as some of the temporal lobe, before it exited through the cranium. The shot would have been fatal, but before Bedi could confirm that this was indeed the cause of death, he needed to check that nothing else had killed Mr. Leveque first. That meant he needed to check the cut in the chest cavity.

That wound was made around the same time as the head wound. It was done with surgeon’s precision, using a blade that must have been razor-sharp. Such cuts through the sternum usually required a saw, but here there was an even, single line that looked as if it had been made as easily as a painter strokes pigment onto a canvas.

As he used grips to open the chest cavity, Bedi could see that the bones inside were fractured – pulverized, really, but from the outside the wound was so neat and clean…

Something suddenly caught Bedi’s eye. It was shiny and small, reminding him of cat’s eye marbles that he used to play with as a child back in India, but the dark center shape was rectangular, like a goat’s iris. He reached in, trying to grab it. He was starting to think this looked more like a torture turned staged suicide. Had Mr. Levesque maybe met a different kind of monster up North?

All the breath left Bedi when he saw the object disappear. No – blink. It was an eye.

Before he could pull his hand out of Mr. Levesque’s chest cavity, something grabbed Bedi’s wrist tight enough that he could feel the tiny bones at the end of the radius crush. He screamed in terror and pain as he tried to yank his arm free. Whatever this was, it held him there, trapped him like a rabbit in a snare. Bedi could hear a terrified Nina calling for him and frantically attempting to open the door, yet some supernatural force barred it shut.

Slowly, a being emerged out of Mr. Levesque's body as if lifted by a platform under a trap door. It was as if the hole in the corpse was a doorway down to the depths of what the Abrahamic religions called hell.

The being had no eyes where a normal human’s were, yet two goat’s eyes on its chin, and a hideous smile that crossed its pallid face. As it rose, it let go of Bedi’s arm, but by this time Bedi was too afraid to do anything but fall backward onto the floor, eyes wide in awe and fear.

The being stood there, oddly elegant in its upright posture and brown suit. Its bald head looked dull and sickly in the morgue’s harsh fluorescent lighting. It gently wiped some guts off its shoulder and dropped them on the tiled gray floor before dismounting the autopsy table in one large step.

Then, it looked at Dr. Bedi, cocking its head as if examining him, before reaching back into Mr. Leveque to pull out a brown bowler hat. The monster put it on his head, adjusted it, then politely tipped it before walking over to the window and crawling out into the wider world.

When Bedi recovered from the shock enough to regain control of his body again, he scurried for the white landline phone in the corner of the morgue.
A children’s rhyme from his childhood kept repeating in his mind:

You see him once, there’ll be nowhere to hide

When you see him twice, he climbs inside

“Pick up, pick up, pick up!” He muttered anxiously to himself as he listened to the phone ring on the other side of the line.
“Yes?” a man answered.

“Sargent Aziz, it's Dr. Bedi.” his voice filled with urgency. “Don’t let anyone watch any surveillance tapes of Mr. Levesque's apartment. Stay away from that place!”

“Why…?” Aziz started to ask, confused.
“ I think I just saw the Gooweny-Ein.” Bedi replied.

It dawned on him why Mr. Levesque’s eyes had been cut out. If even that hadn’t spared that poor man, then Bedi realized he was truly doomed.