“The Body and the Brain” (Strange Stories, June 1939)

Bloch, Robert, and Henry Kuttner [Keith Hammond]. “The Body and the Brain.” Strange Stories, June 1939, pp. 116-?. 

The story opens with Doctor Otho cutting off his own head. He felt no pain while doing it and watches his headless body lift his severed head and place it onto an open jar containing “gray, bubbling liquid” (71). His awareness remains intact as do his senses. He watches as his body first mops up the blood on the floor and then applies the experimental X-2 to stanch the neck bleeding. Otho notes that the headless body did the correct steps but out of order. Gradually, Otho reveals his plan. He and his former mentor and now partner, Savoli, have developed X-1 and X-2, substances that allow them to keep severed limbs—even heads—alive and then reattach them without complication. Savoli wants to share the formula with the world for the good of humanity, Otho wants to maintain control of it; he wants riches and fame. Otho hatches a plan to kill Savoli without the possibility of detection. He trains himself to go to Savoli’s home so that it becomes a habit. He cuts off his own head, watches as the body places a false head onto itself, and dresses as a woman. Otho trusts the body to go to Savoli’s home, grab him by the hair, and toss him out of the window. 

Otho sets it up so that he has the perfect alibi—he never left his own home. It will take a week for his head reattachment to fully heal, and so he plans to feign illness. Otho’s servant answers the phone and rushes to Otho’s room. He reports that Savoli called and said he was attacked by a woman who tore the wig from his head. A wig! Otho never expected that. It is totally outside of the habits he built into his body’s muscle memory. Now he is afraid. He hears the body return. He knows that the body will remember every step but that it might perform them out of order. He is just a head on a jar in bed, and so when the body comes back to the room, Otho cannot defend himself. The body grabs him by the hair and tosses the head and jar out the window where it is discovered by Savoli and the servant. 

This is a tough story to find! Page scans of this particular issue (Strange Stories, June 1939) are not available online that I can find, and it was reprinted only one other time: in the Centipede Press edition of Henry Kuttner’s stories. Fifteen years down the road, that volume is not held by libraries and is pretty expensive to buy second-hand. Lucky for us, Jim Nemeth’s friend on Facebook, Sachin Walia, sent page scans for us to read. Thank you, Sachin!! This is now the third (out of four) Kuttner/Bloch collaboration I will read for this blog. The others are “The Black Kiss” (1937), The Grip of Death (1939), and “The Grab Bag,” which was first published in Weird Tales in 1991 and then soon thereafter in The Early Fears (1994). I have not yet read that final story, bit so far the physical horror is what characterizes these stories for me. Although Bloch drops decapitation often into his own stories, this one features a graphic depiction of intentional self-beheading where the victim’s consciousness remains intact through the process. The image of the animated headless body putting on a fake head and dressing as a woman in order to perform a murder—that’s pretty far out there even for these two. I imagine a fun evening of brainstorming ever-weirder ideas for this story, each friend trying to outdo the other. From a psychological standpoint, the idea that our bodies continue to perform actions out of habit without the participation of one’s conscious thoughts is an interesting insight that this story relies on for its effect. Interestingly, the most recent research tells us that this idea is largely true, that we do the majority of things that we do without giving it any conscious thought (Gardner). That is not to say that our brains are not involved—they certainly are—but if the decapitation in this story left part of the brain attached to the body, for example, then we might be getting somewhere. Not that science would make this story more or less fun to read. I finished it with my mouth open wide. What insanity! I love it!