The Pit of Hell

by Martin Hill Ortiz

About the Author: Martin Hill Ortiz is a professor of Pharmacology at the Ponce University of Health Sciences in Ponce, PR where he lives with his wife and son. Along with four novels, he has had over a score of short stories published in magazines and anthologies. One of his works, A Very Entertaining Death, appeared in the March 7, 2016 issue of Mystery Weekly. His recent novel, A Predator's Game, Rook's Page Publishing, takes place in 1896, where Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle endeavor to stop a madman.

Excerpt

Dixon MacGrath’s head was missing: that couldn’t be good for his health. Peeking a bit more closely at his full body cast, I noticed that the rest of him had also vanished. Full immobilization, his doctor had ordered. Did disappearing count the same as moving?

The twenties have been a time of scientific marvels: of aeroplanes and rustless steel, of baseball games over the radio and iron-clad tanks. I’d take science over spirits, except for the liquid kind found in a speakeasy. There had to be a rational explanation.

Left behind on top of a hospital bed was an empty plaster husk. Lying on its back, the stiff arms and legs of the shell pointed up like a puppy begging for a belly scratch. I rapped a knuckle on the cast: nothing but an empty thud.

I noted my signature among a dozen others on the dried plaster: this wasn’t a copy-cat cast. I tipped the shell on its side to search for signs of cleaving or rejoining. The rough latticework of gauze set beneath the plaster circled around and around the cast without break. There was an evacuation hole at the rear end for the times when the nurses fit his hinder parts to a bedpan.

Either escape artist MacGrath had squeezed his way up through the neck-hole or he’d shat his way to freedom. By one means or another, he’d finally pulled off a miraculous feat, even if it had come a day too late.

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