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Young Walter Gorman liked to imagine himself and other people inside out, turned inside out like a glove could be turned inside out. He looked forward to the hours of the day when he could be free to do this. In the classroom while the professors droned, he imagined them inside out. At home he sat in a chair for hours, staring.
"What are you doing, Walter?" his aunt asked him again and again.
"Nothing," he said.
"As usual!"
He lived with his aunt, two cousins almost his own age, and his aunt's latest friend, Oliver.
At last Walter realised this inside-out obsession was a problem. Perhaps he was mad. So he went to the family doctor and told his story.
"Inside out? With all the organs glistening on the outside!" wondered the doctor. "Could be a sign, Walter, that you should devote yourself to medicine."
"You don't think I'm mad, then?"
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no."
"What if I start actually wanting to cut people up and pull them inside out?"
Doctor Fitch laughed. That day he had told five people they were terminally ill. This was light relief.
"I'm going to be a doctor," Walter Gorman announced to his aunt.
She was delighted. She told all her friends, invited them to a 'I'm-going-to-be-a-doctor' party.
But when they turned up in a gaggling group Walter said through a crack in the door: "She's not well. Another time."
"Hope she gets better soon, Walter. You'll be able to fix her one day yourself, eh, lad!" they said.
She could not be fixed, of course. She and her two children had been cut up and turned inside out. Walter hadn't done it, no, no - at least he did not remember doing it. Oliver would be home from the factory soon! What would he do with him? The idea of turning him inside out didn't appeal.
Walter stood in the dining-room with all the lights on, studying the bodies, worrying about the mess. Being inside out wasn't the least bit like his fantasies of inside out.
Suddenly Oliver was behind him with a terrific shout. Walter Gorman had no time to turn around. Oliver stabbed him in the back and though he was already dead when he was being turned inside out, his mental life continued for a bit. He realised that his thoughts about inside out people had drifted into his thinking from Oliver's sick mind, a telepathic infection of the bloodiest kind. All those nights when he had heard Oliver and his aunt having sex in the next bedroom, and Oliver thinking only about her being inside out while he thrusted. His uncle's ponderings had drifted through the wall into poor Walter and ruined his final days.
In a dazed, out-of-focus out-of-body experience, the disembodied spirit of Walter Gorman saw himself inside out and gained no excitement from the view whatsoever. And then he was gone.
Oliver's real name, of course, wasn't Oliver. He skipped, dripping in blood, that very hour, and though the police followed a trail of inside out bodies all over the globe during the next decade, they never caught up with him. Doctor Fitch scanned his newspaper every morning for news of another inside-out killing. It was the only thing that cheered him up. When he found one he was a better doctor that day.
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