Behind O’Halloran’s

Marco Riggs kept his clinic down an alley behind O’Halloran’s Laundry, around the corner from a noodle shop that never opened. The steam vents never stopped hissing. The walls sweated bleach. He wasn’t quite a doctor anymore. Turns out it’s easier to lose a license than the habit, especially with a quick temper and a taste for horses.

It didn’t matter. The syndicate found a use for him.

They dragged the city’s dregs through his door. Men who drank themselves to sleep because their consciences wouldn’t shut up. Men with shaking hands and flash-bulb eyes who saw their mistakes every time they blinked. Men who’d done things so bad the guilt pressed down like wet concrete.

Marco was the only one who knew how to relieve the pressure. Permanently.

He worked by lamplight, hunched on a worn stool, gloves slick, a scalpel with a chip in the handle balanced between his fingers. No anesthetic. No assistants. If a patient was lucky, he got a belt to bite and a swig of bourbon. The muscle who dragged him in would hold him still.

When a man lay across the metal table and muttered his confession, Marco could somehow see it, the wrong thing.

It was always under the ribs, a knot or a shadow, a puckered bit of scar. He pressed until he found it, made one clean cut, applied steady pressure, and pulled slow.

What came out wasn’t normal tissue. Sometimes gray rubber, harmless as fat. Sometimes a bundle of thread that smelled like pennies and twitched like nerve. Once, it crawled.

Marco never asked questions. Neither did the syndicate. Everyone slept better after he finished his work.

One night the biggest enforcer Marco had ever seen dragged in a new patient. Dragged was the only word that fit. This one wasn’t buying what Marco was selling. Thick neck, gold chain, walked like the floor owed him rent. He introduced himself as Dale Macellaro.

“Mr. Macellaro, have a seat and tell me what’s been weighing on you,” Marco said, reaching for fresh gloves.

Dale balked. The enforcer, a slab of meat shaped vaguely like a man, shoved him forward and forced him onto the table.

“I don’t got shit wrong with me, Doc. I told this ape, I told management, and now I’m telling you.”

“That’s what they all say,” Marco said. He believed Dale believed it. But nobody ended up on that table without something inside them that needed cutting out.

Dale unbuttoned his shirt and lay back. “You ain’t gonna find nothing in me that needs removing. Maybe a gallstone.”

“Just lie down,” Marco said.

Dale did. No nerves in him at all, and somehow that was worse than fear.

Marco pulled the lamp close, opened Dale’s shirt wider, and started feeling along the abdomen. Two fingers up from the floating ribs toward the sternum, steady downward pressure. He’d done it a thousand times.

He pressed again. Checked the other side. Nothing. No knot. No bruise. No rot. Just a hollow space where weight should have been.

“See, Doc? I told ya. Nothing there that needs removing.” Dale propped himself up just enough to give Marco a grin that tightened his jaw.

Marco didn’t answer. He had never felt this before. The man wasn’t innocent. Innocent men carried tension. A defensiveness lived in the shoulders. Dale had none of it. He was empty in a way Marco didn’t have a name for.

“What’s wrong, Doc?” the enforcer asked.

“Nothing’s wrong, not exactly. Mr. Macellaro doesn’t seem to have anything to remove.” Marco started peeling off his gloves.

“No,” the enforcer said. “We brought him here to be worked on. Boss said so. So work.”

“You don’t understand. There’s nothing there to take out. If anything, he’s missing something.”

“Yeah,” Dale said. “Missing the game I got money on.”

“Listen,” the enforcer said. “You’re going to work on him. Take out nothing for all I care. I just need to say I watched you do it.” He picked up the scalpel from the tray and handed it to Marco.

Marco looked from Dale to the enforcer. Nobody else in the room saw how pointless this was. Dale picked at his fingernails. The enforcer was the kind of eager that meant he hoped Marco refused so he’d get to break something.

Resigned, Marco took the scalpel. “Alright. Hold him still.”

“What?” Dale frowned, more annoyed than frightened.

The enforcer pinned his arms and legs with little effort. Dale cursed until the enforcer slapped him across the head hard enough to shut him up.

Marco pulled the lamp down. He found the hollow spot again, the dead patch under the ribs, and set the tip of the scalpel against the skin.

“This won’t be pleasant,” he said. “If you don’t fight it, it’ll be over faster.”

Sweat ran down Dale’s forehead, but he didn’t look scared.

Marco pressed the blade into the abdomen. Before even a trickle of blood showed, a hard hiss filled the room, the sound of air being dragged somewhere it shouldn’t go.

Dale went rigid. A flat tension spread under his skin, not outward but inward, as if a vacuum had opened behind his ribs.

The air pressure shifted. Everything in the room leaned toward the incision.

The glove box skidded across the floor and vanished into the wound. Papers lifted. Rolls of tape, packets of gauze, anything loose. Each hit the cut, hung for a heartbeat, then slipped inside Dale like it belonged there.

It wasn’t enough. The pull grew. The dolly rolled and slammed into the table. The metal tray lifted, twisted, and vanished into Dale’s chest. The lamp groaned on its arm, joints creaking as it tilted toward him.

The noise swallowed Dale’s voice. “Hey, Doc, what’s happening?”

Marco didn’t know.

The enforcer let go of Dale’s legs and pressed both hands over the incision. Sensible idea, until the pull caught him too. His hands sank in past the wrists. He cursed and dug his heels into the tile, but the drag was stronger. By the time Marco stood, the enforcer was buried to the elbows.

Marco watched, helpless, as the man struggled. It slowed only because of his sheer size.

What Marco couldn’t get past was how calm Dale looked. It could have been shock or something worse. But a man should scream with that much weight disappearing into him.

“Little help here,” the big man shouted. His feet were planted hard, back arched, locked in a tug-of-war with nothing.

Marco crossed the room, braced behind him, and pulled with everything he had. A textbook was the heaviest thing he’d ever lifted.

The enforcer’s forearms slid out inch by inch, skin and muscle dragging against something that didn’t want to let go. With one final heave, they broke free. They hit the floor as a loud pop cracked through the room, and the suction snapped back to full force.

They stayed low, pressed tight to the ground, weight against concrete, trying to hold on.

It didn’t help for long. Marco lost purchase first, sliding slow but certain toward the table. He reached for the enforcer, but the man didn’t offer a hand. Somehow he held his own, a planted tree in a storm, while Marco drifted forward.

Marco’s head cracked against the table. Tools and wrappers spun past his ears, caught in a tight, angry circle. No matter how he twisted or braced, he kept inching closer. His feet lifted. His body turned. He slid across Dale’s lower half until his cheek dragged across the man’s sweat-slick stomach.

“What’s the plan, Doc?” Dale asked. There was a shake in his voice now.

“Do I look like I have a fucking plan?”

“Sew him up,” the enforcer shouted from the floor, every word forced out as he clung to the concrete.

“Great idea. Who wants to volunteer to grab my suture kit?” Marco’s face inched closer to the one-inch incision, close enough to feel heat rising from it.

“What’s it look like? I can try,” the enforcer said.

“Small white rectangular box. It was on the tray on my cart.”

“Uh,” Dale said. “What if I saw that go inside me, Doc?”

“Well, did you?” Marco could feel the hairs on his head stand on end, tugged toward Dale’s chest cavity.

“Not sure. I think so?”

“I don’t see it on your cart,” the enforcer called out. He had managed to get to his feet and was wrapped around a steel support beam, clothes snapping in the wind as the pull tried to peel everything off him.

Marco shut his eyes and forced himself to think. Dale had told him he had no sin, nothing to cut out. Dale had been right. There was nothing in him except a hunger that didn’t belong there. Logic said the only way to stop this was to feed it. Not sin. Every man had sin. What Dale lacked was guilt.

“Find my scalpel,” Marco said.

He couldn’t pull himself far enough to look and had to trust the enforcer to find it. Every second dragged him closer to the void working under Dale’s ribs. Through it all, he kept waiting for the usual signs: hands pushing at his head, the jitter of a man losing his breath, screaming. Dale gave him none of it. The calm in him was wrong.

“I think that may have gone in too, Doc.” Dale’s answer came after a silence that made Marco sick.

Marco’s neck twisted as the pull tightened. Warm, wet pressure closed around his forehead and right eyebrow. His heart slammed against his ribs like a debt collector pounding on a door. He pushed with everything he had and gained only a few centimeters. The fight was leaving him. He felt himself start to let go.

Then a hand large enough to make his seem small pressed something into his palm: the chipped handle of his own scalpel.

“Funny thing,” the enforcer said. “I couldn’t remember where I saw it. Then I remembered it stuck in my arm when I tried to cover the wound.”

Marco managed a smile and tore open his shirt. The undershirt came apart in clumps. He felt along his ribs, doing the best he could under the pull, a slow dragging that made him think of being born in reverse.

Behind him he heard the enforcer hit the floor, slide, and stop near the table. The man must have used everything he had getting the scalpel back to him. Built like a box truck, born to break down doors, and he’d burned it all on that one move.

For a stupid second Marco wanted to curse him for ever bringing Dale through his door. Then he realized the oaf might have saved his life.

He found the lump beneath his ribs. Small, tight, familiar. He pressed it and felt heat rise through him like blood that had been waiting years to move.

He thought of the kid he misdiagnosed, the one whose mother called every day until she stopped. He thought of the old woman he let rot in a nursing home because taking a pay cut for a simple procedure felt beneath him. He thought of the nights he carved the worst pieces out of men who deserved to choke on them, then sent those same men back into the streets to do more damage.

He thought of the bribes he took.

The charts he altered.

The overdose he wrote off as “bad reaction” because the morgue paid for quick signatures.

The bottle of fentanyl he stole from a dying man’s drawer because he liked the label.

The intern he blamed for a botched surgery he knew he caused.

The handful of times he washed his hands with nothing but tap water.

All of it pressed forward at once.

Sanitation be damned, Marco cut deep into himself. He dropped the scalpel and dug his fingers into the wound. His own guilt pulled back from his touch like a mollusk retreating into its shell. He felt it slip, slick and warm, and pushed his hand in farther. Muscle shifted. His ribs ached. The suction from Dale hauled him forward while he groped through his own insides for something solid.

Finally his fingertips caught a shape that didn’t belong there.

He pulled.

What came out was slick and pulsing, something that clung to him as if it had grown with the rest of him. The more he tugged, the more it resisted. It stretched and throbbed and tried to recoil into the cavity it had carved for itself over the years.

Marco shoved his other hand in beside the first, feeling along the root of it. His fingers traced where it had latched to bone. He wedged his hand between the mass and his ribs and pried. The thing broke loose with a wet snap, the sound of an elastic band made of sponge tearing away from flesh.

Marco reached up, shoved his hand past his own face, and jammed the thing he’d torn out of himself into the slit in Dale’s side. The instant it disappeared, the noise died. The pull went with it. The clinic fell quiet in a way that felt wrong.

Marco pushed back and finally came free. The wound on Dale’s side had shrunk to the neat little cut he’d made at the start. There was no sign of the tools, the gauze, the trash, any of it. Dale lay on his side, limp, breathing shallow.

Marco got to his feet and pressed a hand against his own torn-open flesh. Blood slid down his stomach in warm streaks. The place looked wrecked. Supplies overturned. Floor scraped bare where the suction had dragged everything into one point. The enforcer stood braced on a support beam, staring at Dale like the man might peel open again.

“You good?” Marco asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ll live.” Marco peeled his hand from his side and glanced at the damage. Nothing a bottle of whiskey, a squeeze of superglue, and a fistful of gauze wouldn’t handle. “I’d appreciate it if you and Mr. Macellaro saw yourself out now.”

The enforcer nodded, walked to the table, hauled Dale over his shoulder, and headed for the door. At the threshold he stopped.

“For what it’s worth, Doc, I’ll put in a word that we stay clear of this place for a bit.”

“That would be kind of you.”

They left. The door thudded shut behind them. The sound felt heavier than it should have.

Marco cleaned the wound and sat on the worn stool. Instinct made him check for the guilt that had lived under his ribs for years, the one he’d learned to ignore but never outrun.

It was gone.

The emptiness that took its place felt colder than the clinic.

He would have preferred the pain.

---

D.J. Tuskmor grew up in New England, where local folklore sparked a love of horror. By day, he works in cybersecurity; by night, he writes. You can find his latest work in Shotgun Honey, 96th October, and Weird Lit Magazine. Connect on socials @Tuskmor.