The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler

by K. H. Koehler Books

  He was unhappy with Louise.

  She had been so innocent, so naïve. Once. What had the Doctor done to her?

  With his failing strength he put out a hand to grasp the toe of one of her weird, old lady shoes, but Louise stamped her foot down hard on Tim’s wrist, holding him apart even now, holding him immobile.

  The room became kaleidoscopic with lights. Besides Louise stood the Doctor, the man who had remade her. He wielded a syringe, which he gave to her. The sight of the needle dragged a primitive terror up from Tim’s body that echoed out of his mouth in a long, jagged scream, like a delayed reaction to his disemboweling.

  Lying pinned and helpless, he scratched at Louise’s shoe, but she was like iron. She was immovable. “Louise,” he begged. “Louise…please…please, Louise,” he said like a song, “let me die…”

  “I assure you, Tim,” Louise said as she bent low, the syringe biting deep and insectlike into his spine, “your death is the last thing on my mind.”

  2

  After Louise had replaced her dress and fixed it properly, she carried Tim back to his cell.

  Pymm did not approach them as she walked down the long stone throat of the hallway, though he did make queer snuffling noises in the dark. He was much too afraid of the Doctor.

  She placed Tim on his gurney, then stood against one leaking grey wall, near the door, her arms hanging lax at her sides, and waited. The Doctor said the Elixir could take up to twelve hours to circulate through human blood, bone, marrow, and down into the precious, hidden DNA molecules, where it did its finest work.

  Time passed, but time did not reign here.

  Slowly Tim came around, which was rather bad for him. Rats had been gathering around the foot of the gurney for some time—there were no cats permitted in the Gallery. Tim groaned under the heavy drugging effect of the Elixir. Louise remembered well the dreamy, leaden feeling of it.

  In time he lifted his head. It fell back with a crash on the gurney as if decapitated. He let out a rattling curse, then tried once more.

  This time he made it. This time he sat upright.

  His flesh was ragged and gaped like an envelope. He shuddered and touched the empty, deflated cavern of his bowels. He suddenly passed out. But when he came around again he was a much wiser man. He did not touch himself this time. He turned his head, instead, and eyed Louise.

  His eyes were as vast and wild and unseeing as Pymm’s. “You bitch…you fucking cunt!” he wheezed. “What did you do to me?” For one clear moment rage overcame all over instincts, even those for self-preservation, and Tim pitched himself forward in a vague attempt to reach her.

  Louise stepped backward.

  Tim landed crumpled on the floor. A wave of rats parted for him, then came together again, like water.

  Louise waited patiently while the rats did their work. It took much of the night.

  Near morning, Tim, or what had once been Tim, creaked on the floor at her feet. Every piece of flesh, every string of soft viscera, every organ had been raped from his body. He was little more than a wet red skeleton. His skullish head clicked back and forth as she approached him, and the naked jaw dropped open in fear, but no sound was possible.

  She lifted him up in her arms—he was as light as a toy—and placed him back on the gurney. A rat clambered up the side of the gurney and raced through the hollow cage of Tim’s ribs. Without really noticing, Louise turned and exited that place of the damned, shutting the door soundly behind her.

  3

  “Where is the Doctor?” Louise asked when she found Mary in her room, hanging her newly laundered clothing in the wardrobe. She knew better than to speak to the old woman except out of necessity. But now that her work was through, Louise needed to find him immediately.

  She needed to know if he meant what he said about her being his wife. She needed to know if they could move ahead together.

  Mary turned, her mouth pinched, Lizabeth’s dress—now Louise’s—draped across her arm like a forlorn pet. “Don’t you know? You’re always with him.”

  Louise stood immobile, the scalpel in her sleeve already sliding down into her hand. If she had to kill this woman to make her understand her place here, then so be it. If the Doctor was king, then she was queen. Not a consort, but an equal. She took a step toward Mary.

  Mary, sensing the fission in the air, looked away. “He’s Above. In the church. There’s been an intruder.”

  Concern sickened Louise. The Doctor never went Above except under cover of night. If he had done so this morning, then there was substantial danger, something unavoidable.

  Gathering her skirts, Louise raced away down the warren of tunnels like a heroine in one of the Doctor’s beloved books, escaping from the castle keep and up, up to the place of destinies.

  4

  The bones of the Church of St. Bridget lay in disembodied ruins.

  There was nowhere that was safe. It was all a deathtrap. Only one window remained, a tall portal that depicted a white dove against blue glass, carrying an olive branch. It was weathered, cracked. Sunlight pierced the window in thin swords that reached down to shards of shattered wood that had once been a pulpit.

  Dust swarmed through the hot daylight and pricked Louise’s eyes like hot tears as she climbed a barely serviceable staircase and burst fully through the door and into the ravaged body of the church. It had been a long time since she had seen daylit sky and flooding light. She felt like running, some unholy beast, until she found shelter underground, but the Doctor might need her.

  She spotted him immediately. He stood under the window of the dove, his footing familiar and confident upon the fallen girders. He was an unwelcomed black blot against the dull golden walls of this sanctuary. One arm was uplifted in what might have been mistaken as a salute to the rising sun. From it dangled an old man by his throat, his toes inches above the rubble.

  “You dare,” the Doctor was growling, “come here?”

  Louise slowed her pace. She was quickly losing interest in the present drama. If some bum had trespassed, stirred the Doctor’s ire, that was not her concern. In fact, the world Above was now the complete antithesis of her concern.

  But then the old man lifted his dirty head, and Louise saw, and hesitated. The man was not very old, she realized. Unwashed and unshaven, with lines of sorrow cutting knifelike through his face, he only seemed so. He saw her. He looked at her, dismissed her, and then looked back at the Doctor. He did not recognize her, of course, as Tim had not. Not at first.

  “My daughter’s here,” the old man croaked. His voice was broken from alcohol and disuse, his body weak from neglect. But indignation had made him brave in the end. “I know she’s here. I want to see here. I want to see my daughter…!”

  “And how, sir,” answered the Doctor, drawing the young-old man close to his blankly wrapped face and seething eyes, “can you be so certain of that?” He had a scalpel already in hand. He held it like an extension of his own body, though the stranger could not see it. Neither could Louise, but she knew it was there, nonetheless.

  “Stop,” said Louise, suddenly.

  She saw the Doctor relax his grip on the man, but only a fraction.

  The man stirred. “She sent me a letter!” he screeched. “I have a letter from her!” He ripped at his clothing awkwardly until an envelope was torn free, creased and stained from alcohol and urine.

  Louise felt sick. She lifted her skirts and picked carefully over the broken debris until she was standing at the Doctor’s side. She picked up the plain white envelope.

  Inside there was indeed a letter, as the man had said. She read it through. In it she, Louise, begged the man to come find her here, at the Church of St. Bridget, claiming she was the prisoner of a madman. The Doctor immediately dropped the man, who curled up on a bed of rusted debris and fallen rebar and began murmuring to himself like any other drunkard in this city. The Doctor turned to approach her, to take the letter.

  “Did you do this?” he asked.
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  “No.”

  He took her ungently by the shoulder, his great power pressing into her body on all sides. His eyes ripped into her like blades, searching to extract the truth.

  She held her ground. She was his Poppet, perhaps, but not his minion. Not his Pymm monster. She was not afraid of him. She glared back. “Mary must have sent it.”

  “Mary,” he began, “would not…”

  “Mary had my things, my addresses. She was the only one who knew about…him.” It was all she could say of the man clawing at the debris to retrieve his beloved letter. “She loves you, Doctor. They all do. Of course she sent the letter.” She turned the full force of her burning eyes, Doctor-made, on him, so that he would see that she spoke truth. “I told you,” she said softly, “I want to be with you forever.”

  His strength lessened around her. He believed her, at last. “Louise,” he said, the sound of her name hissing past the bandages, “he is your father?”

  The old man had found his way to her. He pawed at her shoe, the way Tim had earlier. “Louise…” he murmured through his drunken haze and swollen mouth. “Where is Louise…?”

  “No,” she answered the Doctor. “I don’t have a father.” She crouched down before the old raggedy-man, the last remaining link between herself and her old world. She took his chin in her hand and directed his eyes upward.

  He looked. His eyes were a faded harvest brown, as hers had been, once upon a time. The eyes were what she remembered, though the body had changed, withered. Once he had been a big man, able to force her into a closet, or to hold her down against a bed and undo her at will. No more. Now she had power. “Old man,” she said through her teeth, “Louise is dead.”

  His eyes gradually registered the impact of her words, but he had nothing to say to her. She was not his Louise.

  The Doctor came up behind her, very close. The scent of time enwrapped her. “We could take him below,” he suggested. “What fun we could have.”

  Louise stood up smoothly and reached for the Doctor, clasping his arms about her waist. His strength entered her through that simple touching. “He’s already in hell,” she said. “There’s no more we can do.”

  Turning, she led the Doctor Below. Later, she knew, after they had enjoyed tea and had retired to the golden bedchamber, they would together devise an appropriate punishment for Mary.

  ***

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