Contents
Title
Publisher's Note
1 The Final Act
2 Midnight's Gift
3 Grave Robber's Message
4 The Aspiring Detective
5 The Disowned Peacock
6 Maya's First Client
7 Doctor's Dilemma
8 Maya Gets the Case
9 Charles Melcrose's House
10 The Shoe Salesman
11 Sophia Morgue
12 Karim Khan's House
13 Maisie's Question
14 The Indian Pub
15 Maya's Auction
16 Unexpected Luck
17 Ernst's House
18 Anatomist's Secret
19 The Trip Back
20 The Doctor Speaks
21 Who Killed Bernard
22 Bernard's House
23 Grave Robber's Accomplice
24 The Fourteenth Day
25 Grave Robber's Grave
26 The Glass Coffin
27 Midnight Fracas
28 Secret of the Crypt
29 The Raid
30 A Wife's Rage
31 Secret Warehouse
32 Rattan Singh's Last Job
33 Afterworld
34 Hole in the Wall
35 Evening Dinner
Free Stuff
Spread the Word
About the Author
THE ANATOMIST
NOAH ALEXANDER
Copyright © 2020 Noah Alexander
All rights reserved.
No part of this document may be reproduced , distributed or transmitted in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by the law.
1
The Final Act
Bernard Knowles knew the topography of the Kolaso Cemetery better than he knew the curves of his favorite prostitute in Flea Market. The Grave Robber had spent more nights here, digging dead people’s treasures, than he had on Isamelda’s bed.
Unlike her, the graveyard never disappointed Bernard.
He walked over silently to the grave of Rev. Colin Monique, the first man to be buried in the graveyard two centuries ago, to pay his respects. Bernard Knowles was a superstitious man. Especially when it came to work, and he followed all his rituals diligently to avoid the fate that had befallen many others in his profession. Grave robbing was a dangerous business, after all. Full of unexpected dangers. One bad night and he might end up in a jail, caught by police in a raid, or get killed by an avenging relative of a dead man he had disturbed in his last campaign. He would not even bet against the probability of the dead rising from their graves to punish him.
There were a lot of sordid possibilities and it never hurt to be a little superstitious.
Keeping his shovel and other tools on the side, the body snatcher carefully stepped upon the stone grave of the late Reverend. He looked around the dark cemetery to make sure that no one was around to witness his little custom, then hopped on the grave once. The sound of his leather boots striking stone melted hastily in the thick mist hanging in the graveyard. Bernard looked up again, no one had heard him. He hopped once more upon the dead man’s grave, then a third time and fourth.
His ritual was complete, he could now safely take what he had come for, without the fear of divine intervention.
Bernard took up his lantern and tools and scanned the dark cemetery for direction. The night was cloudy, and a thick haze hung upon the rows of ivy-clad tombstones, like smoky wreaths upon dead men. The Kolaso Cemetery was once reserved as the final resting place of rich men - merchants, and bankers who lived in mansions near the Old Harbor. When the New Harbor became operational in the south, half a century ago, the rich men shifted base, leaving the burial ground as a farewell gift to the poor. The cemetery now catered to impoverished clerks, dockworkers, and spice salesmen. People who could not afford to put a nameplate on their dead. They buried their relatives in unmarked graves which could not be differentiated from one another by all but the most trained of eyes. Bernard took pride in the fact that he was amongst the trained ones.
In the midst of the dark tombstones, Bernard soon identified a patch of freshly filled earth. The grave that he had been looking for. With quick excited steps, the body snatcher moved towards his latest grave.
And his last.
This was Bernard’s final excursion to the graveyard. A goodbye souvenir gig which the robber had taken up just because he wanted to retire from the profession with a successful final flourish. He no longer needed to disturb dead men in sleep and then trade their bodies to make a living. He could now afford to spend more nights with Isamelda.
Bernard was about to become a rich man. He had stumbled upon a treasure, one which would allow him to retire in peace.
Bernard regarded his future with a contented sigh. He imagined a beautiful wooden cabin nestling in the verdant hills of Darjeeling. He would buy a tea garden there, and employ a hundred beautiful ladies as leaf pickers, lascivious mountain women with wicker baskets at their backs and round reed hats upon their head, moving dexterously between tea hedges, plucking leaves and singing folk songs. Bernard imagined himself on a horse, waddling between them, his lips spread out in a grin and his hands occasionally caressing the ladies on the back or even lower. He had no idea what such an enterprise would cost, but there was no way it would cost anything more than what he could afford. The treasure in his possession was significant.
But he was getting too ahead of himself, the tea estate was a proposition for the future. For now, he had to dig this dead man up and sell the body. He wanted to do his last job properly and it was important to focus.
Bernard stopped beside the fresh grave, dismounted his professional paraphernalia – a rope, a jute sack, a shovel, and a small trowel, and cast a sly glance towards the gate of the cemetery. Old Johnny, the watchman, was nowhere to be seen. The stars had aligned favorably on his last night at work. Not that the old man would have caused too much trouble. Bernard had been to this graveyard many times before and 2 Cowries usually did the trick. 2 Cowries in the pocket of the old watchman’s worn-out shirt and he could be trusted to sleep through a cyclone. But Bernard preferred to not share his money.
That was one of the reasons he did not particularly miss Bhola.
Bhola was his 12-year-old accomplice who helped him on his grave snatching expeditions. The boy had come knocking on the door of the barbershop where he worked (to most people around Bernard was merely a barber) two years ago looking for a job. Bernard had work for him, but not in the shop. Since his previous companion, Big Felix, had drowned in the Kali River after a particularly intense night at an opium den in the Flea Market, he had been shorn of a supporting hand for his twilight occupation. Bernard had employed the boy as a help and paid him a small portion of each body sold.
But today, Bhola, much like watchman Johnny, was nowhere to be seen. Bernard had told him to be at the cemetery when the church clock tolled 11. But when there was no sign of him half an hour past the agreed time, Bernard had decided to venture out alone. It would be tough to fish out an adult body on his own, but he could manage it. And the prospect of not having to share money with the boy was always motivating.
Bernard put the lantern beside the grave and loosened his shirt buttons. He then took up a shovel in his hands and said a brief prayer.
The first strike was always the most important. Bernard tried to get as much earth in his first strike as possible. It eased his nerves and gave him the courage to go on (
for all his rituals, Bernard still remained wary of his job, scared and edgy). He reminded himself that this was his last sojourn. The thought gave him some warmth and he took a deep breath, raised the shovel high, and brought it down upon the ground. When he pulled it up, he had a huge mound of dark brown soil upon its face. Bernard put the dirt aside, cast a look at the gate again, and prepared for the next blow.
Bernard knew the man whose body he was digging now. Not intimately, but he had seen him around. The dead man used to live in the same locality, a couple of streets away. He wasn’t sure, but he believed that he had shaved the man once or twice in his shop. Bernard had a hunch that Craig Manus would make a good cadaver. He was the right age and build for being a physician’s dissection subject and he had also died of a prevalent ailment.
He knew exactly who would pay the right money for him.
Bernard sold the stolen bodies to people of many professions. Wig makers looking for hair, exorcists trying to contact spirits and native quacks who made medicine out of children’s bones. But by far his most generous customers were physicians and doctors who cut the bodies to peek inside them and figure out where the heart ended, and the stomach began. Nasty business, but they paid him well.
Bernard chuckled at the thought. Craig Manus’s dissected body exhibited to the brainy boys at the university. He found it funny that thousands of the brightest men in Cardim would gain knowledge out of dead Craig. He doubted if living Craig had ever ventured near any college. Like his father and perhaps his father before that, Craig worked in a textile mill and his lungs gave way before he turned 30. In all likelihood, he had left an army of illiterate kids who would take his place at the mill. At least doctors could dissect him now and figure out what it took inside a body to make a man as great a failure in life as he was.
Bernard’s shovel hit something soft. One light stroke more and the white shroud of the dead body came into view. Craig Manus’s family was too poor to spend a coffin on him.
Bernard swept the tip of the shovel upon the body to remove a layer of dirt. He then threw the shovel aside and picked dirt from his fingers carefully avoiding Craig’s face. The gravedigger did not think he was prepared to look the dead man into the eye. Hurriedly he pinched dirt from all around the body to loosen it from the grasp of the earth. He then tied a rope onto the feet and clambered out of the hole. Bernard brushed dirt off his dress then cast another look towards the gate, Johnny was still absent. He wound the rope upon his hand preparing to heave the body up.
A sudden rap of leather shoes on concrete disturbed Bernard. He turned around with a start, ready to escape. Lately, Police had increased patrolling near the cemeteries. Grave robbing had been deemed a dangerous crime by the Minister of Order and many Longstaffs had been assigned to raid graveyards at night and arrest men like Bernard. Many of his competitors in the field had already been caught and put in gaols. From what he had heard, they were not having a good time there. Many were being starved and forced to work in hospitals, disposing of unclaimed dead bodies. Bernard had no intention of joining them and he was prepared to make a dash for it. He quickly dropped the rope, picked up his shovel, the most expensive of his equipment, and stood ready to escape. But the sound had stopped. In the haze of the graveyard, loomed only the dark maleficent tombstones and no other being. He had misheard. Perhaps, the wind was playing a trick.
Bernard wiped his forehead of sweat and turned to finish his job.
But it wasn’t the wind which was playing tricks on him. It was fate.
Bernard’s last job in the graveyard was not to be completed. A tall gaunt man had made a sudden apparition in front of him, blocking the view of the open grave. Before Bernard could make a move, the figure produced a pick Axe from within his robes. The last that the grave robber remembered before air was forced out of his lungs was the pernicious glint of the steel.
2
Midnight's Gift
Dr. Charles Melcrose steadied the eyeball with the end of his pen so that it stopped wobbling in the glass dish in which it was perched. Then carefully, with quick intricate strokes, he began to sketch the organ in his anatomical notebook. He made the spherical contour first, complete with the pink muscular comet tail at the back, then, holding his breath to keep his hands steady, started with the blood vessels which wove thin crimson patterns all over the glazed surface of the eyeball. He left the iris for the end. It was the most important part of the eye, and the most complex, the radial fibers of the diaphragm were a major challenge to reproduce authentically on paper.
Dr. Melcrose was a physician and a professor of Human Anatomy at the university and no man in Cardim took anatomical sketching more seriously than him. He could not bear to misrepresent the specimen even slightly, all details had to reflect upon paper as if the organ itself had been crafted based on his drawing. He felt any digression akin to disrespecting the dead being to which the organ belonged.
And disrespecting the dead was like disrespecting his profession.
At the end of the grueling work, the doctor cracked his fingers and observed his diagram. Confident that the illustration resembled the actual specimen closely, the doctor screwed his pen and took out a rag from the table drawer. The sight of a few slips of paper inside the drawer disturbed him slightly, but he forced them out of his mind. It had been a productive evening and he did not want bits of paper to ruin the pleasant sensation of a successful academic endeavor. He wrapped his hand in a silk glove, picked up the eyeball from the china dish, and dropped it in a glass jar of brine. The doctor placed the jar in a wooden rack beside his table in the midst of other similar containers full of severed ears, noses, pieces of bones and other anatomical specimens of humans and animals. Dr. Charles Melcrose had collected these organs from the numerous dissections that he had performed on humans and animals over the years. They allowed him to peek inside the body and find out secrets that otherwise shrouded the eye.
He cleaned his table of any spot of brine and returned to his notebook to label his sketch. The doctor planned to give a demonstration of the organ to his students at the university next week, as well as publish the results of his study in the Asian Journal of Anatomy. He was sure his findings would be very popular in the city; many physician friends often came to him complaining that eye was the one organ that they had the least power to repair. With his study, Charles was sure, this would change.
In some years, doctors might even be able to fill blind eyes with light. The thought gave him a tingling sensation. It would be nice to be credited for such noble achievement. Charles Melcrose did not readily accept but his longing for recognition far exceeded any other personal desire. There were few things that he would not trade in return for a place in history.
That was the primary reason that he had left his established medical practice in Calcutta and moved to Cardim three years ago. It had been difficult to step into the biggest city in the world to start from scratch but there was no place better for a doctor to make a name for himself than Cardim. A city brimming with diseases and the ailing. Though there was still a long way to go, he had already been justified in his actions. Dr. Charles Melcrose was a well-known figure in medical circles. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that he was often treated like a celebrity.
But his fame was a fairly recent phenomenon. Until a few months ago, Charles Melcrose had been a largely unknown entity in Cardim. Then came the case of Amina Sinclair, the wife of the Mayor of Cardim. The elderly woman had been suffering from stomach ulcers for a large part of her life and the condition had deteriorated to an extent that the doctors had pronounced that, if all went well, she had a week to live. Charles had researched extensively on the ailment and in an academic paper had proposed the use of a radically different approach to treating stomach ulcers. An approach that most established physicians scoffed at. But with no options left, Norman Sinclair, the Mayor, had contacted him and asked him to prove his theory on Amina. That had been the turning point. He had been successful, there
had never been a doubt on that. But the fame that followed was unexpected. As the mayor’s wife recovered dramatically (from being on her bed, a few days away from death, to being seen in an official ball two weeks later dancing merrily with her husband) Dr. Charles Melcrose was pummeled to fame. In a matter of weeks, he was a medical celebrity. Students queued outside his classes, conference organizers rubbed their heels to get him to speak in their conferences, and men who had lost all hope of survival sent gifts and letters filled with grief to get him to treat them.
Charles Melcrose sometimes wondered how long this would last. He wanted it to last forever. But as a person trained in medicine he knew that fame, like the human body, was bound to decay with time and then disappear.
The doctor drew some more details on the eye, jotted a couple more points below the illustration, then stored it carefully in his file. It was time now to go back to his room and get some rest. Charles pushed back his chair and was about to turn when he heard a soft rap on the door to the basement. The doctor checked the time in his pocket watch. It was 4 in the morning.
Who could have come at this time of the day, that too at the basement door?
There were two entrances to his basement office. One which came down from the living room of the house and the other which led directly from the compound outside the house. Only the people who supplied brine or other equipment for his lab used the entrance from the compound. The doctor walked slowly towards the door, yawning. He expected it to be Bernard Knowles, the supplier of cadavers. It had been three weeks since he had last received a body.
“Who’s it?” he asked
There was no answer.
Surprised and slightly irritated, the doctor undid the latch and held the heavy door slightly ajar. A long wooden box lay outside. Charles stepped out to examine the package. Inside the box was a jute sack. With his penknife, he tore open the bag. As he had anticipated, it was a cadaver for his research.
The Anatomist (Maya Mystery Book 2) Page 1