I pulled a bone saw from my satchel and held it up to the glinting light. “We only need his head.”
“Juliet, no!”
I gave her a hard look as I knelt by the man’s chest, steadying the bone saw on his neck. “It isn’t going to kill him again,” I muttered, and threw my weight behind the saw.
It was grisly work, but at least his body was frozen, so there was little blood. Lucy fetched a pumpkin from McKenna’s pantry to place under the sheet so no one would notice a headless body.
I stowed the head in my satchel, taking extra care not to damage the top of the spinal column. Lucy shivered and wrapped her arms across her chest as she turned to Edward’s body.
“What about Edward? We can’t very well cut him into pieces to carry up to the laboratory.”
I clenched my jaw. If we were going to bring him back, it had to be tonight, while there was ample lightning. We needed someone’s help, but I didn’t dare go to Montgomery or Carlyle, and the female servants weren’t any stronger than Lucy or I.
At last, I let out a frustrated groan, knowing I only had once choice.
“Wait here,” I muttered, hating myself for what I was about to do. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I hurried up the stairs into the main section of the house, staying close to the walls where the floorboards squeaked less. I knocked gently on the same door I had so recently left from.
Balthazar opened it, dressed now in his striped blue pajamas, with Sharkey wagging his tail at his heels.
I couldn’t bring myself to look into his eyes. I whispered, “You said you felt compelled to obey Elizabeth, because she was the law. Does that extend to me as well, as the doctor’s daughter?”
“Oh, yes, Miss,” he answered. “I’ve always striven to obey your law as well.”
I took a deep breath, hating myself even more. Balthazar deserved more respect than I was about to give him, and yet I was desperate. “Then come with me. I need your help with something. I fear you aren’t going to like it, and I’m sorry for making you do it. Regardless, you must keep it secret from everyone, even Montgomery.”
His face fell, and it nearly broke my heart. Father had been cruel, but I never had been. Not until that moment.
“I’m sorry, Balthazar,” I whispered. “But you really must come with me. It’s time for you to fill the role of Igor Zagoskin.”
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TWENTY-SEVEN
THAT NIGHT, THE WORLD seemed bathed in blood.
With Balthazar’s help, we carried Edward’s body up the spiral stairs to Elizabeth’s laboratory. He said nothing as he carried Edward, and his silence tortured me with guilt all the more.
“Truly, Balthazar, I wouldn’t ask you to do this unless I had no choice.”
He laid out Edward’s body on the operating table and didn’t speak.
His sullen obedience gnawed at me like rat’s teeth. Of course Balthazar would feel like what we were doing was wrong. If Father had bothered with an ounce of kindness, used anesthesia, taken care with his patients, then Balthazar might feel entirely differently. He might have even supported his work wholeheartedly.
He whined low in his throat, the strongest objection his sense of loyalty would allow him to make.
I closed my eyes. “You can wait outside, Balthazar. You don’t have to watch.”
“But we might need him,” Lucy whispered.
I shook my head. “We’ve already asked too much of him. Balthazar, please just keep watch and let us know if anyone’s coming.”
He gave me one long forlorn look, but there was a flicker of devotion there, too. Even after everything I’d made him do, he still saw me as his beloved master. It only made my heart ache more.
As soon as Lucy and I were alone, I opened the gash in Edward’s chest cavity and began to suture together the severed veins and arteries of his heart.
“Victor Frankenstein first arrived at the idea of reanimation by watching lightning,” I told her as I worked. “Elizabeth told me the story once. A sheep had died in a bog, much like the night I was nearly drowned. It was storming at the time. Lightning struck a tree and carried an electric current through the bog water. The jolt restarted the sheep’s circulatory system. Victor witnessed the entire thing.”
I finished repairing Edward’s heart, then took out the vagrant’s severed head and placed it on the table. I picked up the bone saw.
“Victor was entranced,” I continued, trying to keep Lucy focused on anything other than the fact that I was sawing a stranger’s head in two. “He started to replicate the effect of the lightning on small animals using the lightning rod. Then he discovered he could combine reanimation with surgery and build a human from disparate body parts. That led him to master organ transplantation. That’s why Elizabeth is so good at it, from studying his notes.” With a final heave I sawed clean through the man’s skull to expose the delicate brain. I set down the bone saw and wiped my brow. “She’s transplanted nearly every organ and body part, but never a brain. She never had the chance, because it requires both bodies to be deceased and she’s bound by her oath. One can’t go severing spinal columns while one’s patient is still alive.”
“No.” Lucy grimaced. “I don’t suppose so.”
I inserted forceps into the skull cavity and stretched back the bone, then used a scalpel to carefully remove the posterior lobe, severing the blood vessels and connective tissue, and setting it carefully on the table.
“When you switch this portion of the brain out with Edward’s,” Lucy asked hesitantly, “it won’t change him, will it? His personality and his memories, I mean.”
I prodded the posterior lobe gently, measuring the connective tissues to ensure a proper transplant. “No, it won’t. Remember how Edward told us about the ‘reptile brain’? I did more research on it. They call the posterior lobe that because it controls our most animalistic instincts like impulse control and sexual drive and the voices that tell us we’re hungry or thirsty. It doesn’t store any memory or intelligence or personality; those reside in the front and center lobes of the brain, which will remain intact in Edward’s head. So the Edward we know should remain, but the Beast will be gone.”
She stared at the brain in morbid fascination.
I pointed to Edward. “I need you to help me prop his torso so I can access the back of his head.” Lightning crashed outside, shaking the windowpane. Lucy’s head whipped toward the windows. “We should hurry,” I added, “while there’s still a storm.”
We moved faster, propping his body up, as I marked off measurements on the back of his neck. I selected a scalpel and carefully cut into the base of his head. A spray of blood fanned out over my white apron as I hit an artery—Edward hadn’t been dead as long as the other cadavers. I didn’t bother to wipe it away. The anticipation was almost too much to bear. Would he truly sit up again? Sip tea and read Shakespeare and play backgammon as terribly as he always had?
“Is he supposed to bleed like that?”
Reason snapped back into me as Lucy nodded toward blood dripping down the back of Edward’s neck.
“I injected him with an anticoagulant,” I explained. “It will make him bleed profusely, but it will also help bind the reattachments. You can help. Take that rag and mop it up.”
She hurried to dab the blood away with a clean cloth, exposing the smooth white of the bone beneath. His skull. I made an incision just below the occiput, four inches in diameter, and exposed the pink flesh of his brain. So simple, and yet so complex.
I pressed the scalpel to the base of the brain and cut.
My stomach lurched in response. Before, when I had watched Elizabeth work on Moira’s eye, I had wanted to be the one holding that blade. I had wanted to cut apart the essence of a human and stitch one back up again—and now I was.
“Keep holding his body steady,�
� I said. “And hand me that larger scalpel.”
I knew every fold of skin, every joint and artery. I’d memorized it on pages in a book, and I felt it beneath my own fingers. Lucy handed me the scalpel and took a small step back. My fingers were shaking but I took a deep breath and thought of my father’s steady hands, and mine stilled.
“My God,” Lucy said, watching with rapt attention. “You really were born for this.”
Pride, mixed with shock, laced her breathless words. I wondered what it must feel like to have a parent who supported one’s desires and talents. If only Father had taught me alongside Montgomery. I could have made him proud.
“Yes, now the carotid artery . . . I need to sever the connective tissue. . . .” I already knew the procedure by heart. In another few cuts, the posterior lobe was exposed. A sharp, rotten smell emanated from it, and I nearly dropped my scalpel in revulsion. Edward’s reptile brain was swollen to the size of a rotten and bloated tomato. Deep lines of black marred the purple surface. The tissue looked thin and waxy, and thick yellow puss seeped out of a tear.
Lucy gagged at the rotten-egg smell. “How foul!”
“Indeed. There’s the problem,” I pressed a hand over my own nose as I pointed the sharp end of a scalpel toward the ganglia. “See the connective tissue? It’s diseased. The jackal organs my father used were diseased from rabies, and it combined with the malaria from Montgomery’s blood.”
My eyes followed the pus dripping down the side. I was looking at the Beast in his most animalistic, physical sense. I knew disease and cancers could result in modified brain activity. This swollen, diseased organ had gone one step further: created an entire second self within Edward, toyed with not only his personality, his temperament, but it had also changed him on even a physical level.
The sterile cloth lay on the table; I wrapped it around my nose and mouth to staunch the smell before pressing the scalpel into the base of the medulla. The sharp point sunk into it like butter. White-yellow puss foamed out. Lucy gagged and turned away, but I kept cutting. In another few incisions, I had freed the diseased organ. With hands slick with puss and blood, I unscrewed the lid of a glass jar and dumped the organ inside, sealing away the terrible stench.
In the jar, the organ looked so benign. Could an entire personality truly be reduced to puss and flesh in a glass jar? In a way, loss and longing pulled at my gut. The Beast had been a monster. He’d been a murderer. And yet on some terrible, deep level, he had been the only one to understand me.
“Juliet,” Lucy said, pulling me from my past. “The rain is letting up. The storm won’t last forever.”
I flicked a glance at her: dark hair twisted back tight, streaks of blood on her cheek and staining her hands. Such an innocent face, but she wasn’t innocent any longer. What happened in this room would change her forever.
I jerked her chin toward the metal table. “The manacles. Help me secure him in place.”
She picked up one heavy leather cuff, dusty with disuse. “Is that really necessary?”
“You’ve seen Hensley’s strength. We aren’t taking any chances until we’re certain he’s not dangerous.”
The sight of a gaping hole in the back of Edward’s head made her uneasy, but she strapped him to the table while I sutured the vagrant’s healthy posterior lobe to Edward’s brain stem, wired the vertebra and bone back together, and bandaged his head.
“That’s the worst of it over now,” I said as I reached for the complicated system of wires. “This part is far less bloody. It’s just like we did with the rat.” Her eyes watched in wonder as I attached the electrical nodes to the key neurological points on his body: the sciatic nerve, the base of the spinal cord, the nerves in his wrists. We soaked two sponges in a brine solution and pressed them to the sides of his head. Outside, thunder clapped. It seemed the heavens were as anxious to witness the impossible as we were.
I finished with the wires and then went to the cabinet and opened the drawer. I took out the silver pistol.
“We can’t take any chances,” I said. “On my signal, pull the lever, just like before.” Her hand rested on the lever, her eyes on the storm outside. Rain pelted in through the open window, stinging both of our faces.
Time seemed to slow. I took in the room in flashes: Edward, cold and dead on the table, Lucy with wild eyes awaiting the storm, the pistol in my own numb hand. The hair slowly raised on the back of my neck. Tingles began along the nerves running up the backs of my legs.
“Now!” A bolt of lightning struck the rod, and Lucy threw down the lever. Sparks flashed from equipment that hadn’t felt such direct voltage in forty years. Lucy remained steady, but her eyes were on fire. My breath came fast as pulses of sheer electricity ran down the lightning rod, into the wires, into Edward’s flesh. I could imagine them finding the web of nerves, connecting synapses, traveling from the extremities to the core to the heart to the head, waking everything with a jolt.
More lightning crashed outside, with the sound of a tree falling somewhere. I became aware of a pounding at the door downstairs; no—the door to the laboratory. Balthazar was knocking. He had heard me screaming, but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t make it to the door. Couldn’t even keep a hold of the pistol in my hand.
“Turn it off!” I shouted at last, and Lucy complied.
The equipment powered down with snapping wires, the smell of burned flesh and ozone in the air. Lucy slumped against the table, spent and drained. I forced my fingers to wake up and curl around the pistol. I raised it on instinct toward the body on the table.
More pounding came at the door, followed by Balthazar’s frantic voice asking if we were all right.
“Yes!” I called back in a shaking voice. “We’re fine!”
“Juliet, look,” Lucy whispered, and I whipped around. I pointed the shaking end of the pistol at Edward’s chest. Almost imperceptibly, his chest was rising and falling. He was breathing. His wrist pulsed under the manacle.
“It worked,” she breathed. “We did it.”
I stumbled forward, clutching the table. Below us, Edward’s eyes slowly, impossibly, opened. Swirls of green and brown, hazy now.
He blinked.
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TWENTY-EIGHT
“EDWARD!” LUCY RUSHED TOWARD his side, but I dug my fingers into her arm to hold her back.
“Wait.” I pressed the pistol into Lucy’s hands. “Keep this aimed on him until I tell you it’s safe.”
Edward blinked again, moaning, his eyes glassy and unfocused. I took a cautious step closer, and then another, as a bolt of lightning lit the night sky outside.
“Edward?” I reached out trembling fingers to touch him. “Can you hear me?”
He mumbled a few incoherent words. I let my fingers slide over his forehead. Cold, but alive. Blood pulsed beneath the sheen of sweat on his skin. I was lost for words. We had done it. Defeated death.
“I should check his heartbeat and breathing,” I said, still dazed. “Make sure everything is working.”
I went through the motions I knew by heart, monitoring his pulse, taking his temperature with a mercury thermometer, utterly amazed to see his body working. I pressed the silver end of the stethoscope against his pale skin and listened to his beating heart. What a difference a single day could make. Yesterday Edward was a cold body in the cellar, and now I was feeling his breath against my cheek.
Had I changed as well, in a single day?
“His pulse is a little slow, but still in the range of normal circulatory function.”
“But is he himself?” Lucy asked, clutching the pistol.
I leaned in to lift his eyelids one at a time. Even when the Beast had taken on a more human body, his eyes had still glowed a golden yellow. As I peered into Edward’s glassy eyes, they were an earthy brown the color of peat. Relief overcame me like a warm bath. He mu
mbled a few incoherent words and I caught a sniff of his breath: unwashed teeth and day-old bread. Unpleasant, but very human.
A relieved laugh slipped from my lips. “It’s him.”
Lucy let the pistol tumble from her hand and threw her arms around him, sobbing, petting his hair, speaking as incoherently as he was. I watched the reunion with a mixture of awe and gratitude. Why had I ever doubted this was the right thing to do? Edward was one of us, and he’d sacrificed himself for us, and now we’d repaid that favor. At long last I had made up for Father’s cruelty in making him.
It occurred to me that now I could always keep the ones I loved safe. No matter what happened, accidents or illness or violence, death wasn’t the end anymore. I could bring Lucy back, or Elizabeth, or Balthazar, if anything happened to them. Tomorrow I would marry Montgomery, and we truly could have a lifetime together—many lifetimes—safe from the fears that one of us might die young.
Lightning crashed outside. The electricity flickered and dimmed, and then abruptly cut off. Lucy gasped in the sudden dark.
“The candle—I left one on the cabinet,” she said.
I lit it quickly, letting the light spill out over the wires and switches rigged into the walls of the laboratory. “This is where Elizabeth controls all the electrical systems,” I said. “She’ll be here soon to repair it. We need to clear out quickly before she comes.”
“I don’t think he can walk yet,” Lucy said.
I bit my lip. I’d poured all my energy into reaching this point; I hadn’t actually thought past it to what we’d do with him afterward.
“Help me with the manacles.” In the light of the single candle, Lucy and I unfastened the shackles and dressed him quickly. His unfocused eyes moved back and forth in his sockets, his hair damp and feverish. While Lucy did up the buttons on his shirt, I cleaned the laboratory of signs of our presence as best I could, swept up the blood-soaked sawdust and tossed it out the window along with the poor vagrant’s empty skull, and wiped down the knives and instruments.
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