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I think holy shit, doc, whatja tryin to do? Stroke im back to life?
    She looks around, dazed, at first not sure of what he's talking about until she realizes that she's now holding a mostly erect penis. And as she screams screams and snatches the shears out of Pete's limp gloved hand I find myself thinking again of that old Alfred Hitchcock TV show.
    Poor old Joseph Cotten, I think.
    He only got tocry.

Everything's Eventual (Ss) (2002)

AFTERNOTE
    It's been a year since my experience in Autopsy Room Four, and I have made a complete recovery, although the paralysis was both stubborn and scary; it was a full month before I began to get back the finer motions of my fingers and toes. I still can't play the piano, but then, of course, I never could. That is a joke, and I make no apologies for it. I think that in the first three months after my misadventure, my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. Unless you've actually felt the tip of a pair of postmortem shears poking into your stomach, you don't know what I mean.
    Two weeks or so after my close call, a woman on Dupont Street called the Derry Police to complain of a foul stink coming from the house next door. 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. About half of them were dead starvation and dehydration but many were extremely lively and extremely dangerous. Several were very rare, and one was of a species believed to have been extinct since midcentury, according to consulting herpetologists.
    Kerr failed to show up for work at Derry Community Bank on August 22nd, two days after I was bitten, one day after the story (PARALYZED MAN ESCAPES DEADLY AUTOPSY, the headline read; at one point I was quoted as saying I had been scared stiff) broke in the press.
    There was a snake for every cage in Kerr's basement menagerie, except for one. The empty cage was unmarked, and the snake that popped out of my golf-bag (the ambulance orderlies had packed it in with my corpse and had been practicing chip-shots out in the ambulance parking area) was never found. The toxin in my bloodstream 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 in humans. This is the Peruvian boomslang, a nasty viper which has supposedly been extinct since the 1920s. Dupont Street is less than half a mile from the Derry Municipal Golf Course. Most of the intervening land consists of scrub woods and vacant lots.
    One final note. Katie Arlen and I dated for four months, November 1994 through February of 1995. We broke it off by mutual consent, due to sexual incompatibility.
    I was impotent unless she was wearing rubber gloves.
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    At some point I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems to be such a pervasive fear. When I was a kid of seven or so, the scariest TV program going wasAlfred Hitchcock Presents, and the scariest AHP my friends and I were in total agreement on this was the one starring Joseph Cotten as a man who has been injured in a car accident. Injured so badly, in fact, that the doctors think he's dead. They can't even find a heartbeat. They are on the verge of doing a postmortem on him cutting him up while he's still alive and screaming inside, in other words when he produces one single tear to let them know he's still alive. That was touching, but touching isn't in my usual repertoire. When my own thoughts turned to this subject, a more shall we saymodern? method of communicating liveliness occurred to me, and this story was the result.