by Paula Guran
Keeping close to the wall, Bert crept long-ways around to the isolation cell and, as the other kids watched, he loosened the unlocked chain and slipped inside. Within minutes he was back, breathless and covered in dust. In his outstretched hands, he held a hardcover book.
“Where’d you get that?” Alf asked, and though Bert contemplated saying something snarky, he was too excited to make a jibe. He’d been waiting for the right time to tell the others. He knew they were deathly curious about what he’d been doing with the collection he’d accumulated after their trips to the Isle, but no one had broken rank and demanded to know. That made him proud of them, and himself. Patience was another trait he’d inherited from Mary Ann Ross; the ability to pinpoint the best moment for revelations.
“Found it,” he said; another lesson had been not to tell everything. Inching closer, he lifted a hand, forestalling questions. “Hold your horses; first, look at this.” Scrubbing grimy palms on his trousers, he delicately opened the cover. Inside, the frontispiece showed a stark woodcut of a man—something shaped like a man, at any rate—with scars and stitches running all over his uneven body. One by one, the other kids huddled around the slender book and stared at it, some rapt, some frowning in confusion. “Sit,” Bert hissed. “At least fake that you’re still working.” Once they’d settled, he flipped from illustration to illustration, recounting the story he’d invented to accompany the images—the only story that could possibly fit. Matron Welles’ education program had not included reading lessons.
“See, this bloke is awful lonely,” Bert said, pointing a sticky finger at the black and white picture in his lap. The ink was dark and thick, but the white around it was so bright the kids felt like squinting. Bert frowned as his thumbs left brown smudges on the paper. “He’s gone off to the mountain and left all his family behind. And then we don’t see them anymore,” he flicked ahead, proving to everyone that these “family” pictures stopped after the first couple of chapters, “so I reckon they all must’ve died.”
The kids nodded; it all made perfect sense.
“So the man,” Bert continued, taking a closer look at the etching, “well, he’s not really a man yet, I reckon, not much older than Alf . . . So this bloke’s maybe eighteen—”
“What’s his name, then?” Alf snatched the book from Bert, brought the pages right up close to his nose, as if proximity might help him decrypt the letters squiggling underneath the image.
Bert worried at his lips, then shrugged. “What’s it matter? He’s just some bloke—it’s what he does that’s important.” He waited for Alf to drop his guard, then yanked the volume back. Gently whisking a few flecks of dirt off its cover, he turned the leaves more slowly, looking for a picture he’d studied longer than the rest. The others gradually shuffled around, forming a ragged circle about him, all the better to hear, all the better to see.
Millie shook her head. “Naw, Bert. Give him a name. Can’t keep calling him ‘man’ and ‘bloke’ all the time. Gets confusing.”
“Reckon his mum must’ve named him something,” said Tall Mary.
“Maybe even a nickname?” said Big Sarah.
“I don’t know,” Bert said, sighing. “Whatever. What do you want to call him?”
“Kinda looks like Doctor Dal,” said Ned, leaning over Bert’s shoulder. Tilting his head like he’d seen the doctor do when assessing the dug-ups, the state of their decay, their fitness for his purposes. “Gots round specs just like his, and that same real high forehead, too. And his hair’s all short and patchy, same-same. Reckon William Henry’s took the shears to his scalp the way he does the three-Cs when they’ve acted up.”
They snorted—thought it funny as hell, the way the low-class women carried on when the Overseer brought out his clippers, with the Reverend beside them getting hot and bothered about vanity and sin. The lot of them, watching the blades scissor away tumble after tumble of long shiny locks. Rather lose their lives than their hair, Miss Fiona always mumbled then, looking down her pug nose at the screeching ladies, but keeping a good step back from the Overseer’s reach nevertheless.
“All right,” said Millie, “so the bloke’s name is Dal? Dalkeith?”
Bert shook his head. “Naw, we don’t want anyone sticky-beaking, overhearing, then telling Matron we’re blabbing about—you know.”
Red Mary and Spotty Mary looked over their shoulders, as if expecting Mrs. Welles to materialize. They’d all seen the vivid red stripes across Millie’s scrawny back, which appeared the first night Matron accused her of talking out of turn, and many a night thereafter for one transgression or another.
“No,” he said again, “let’s just call him Frank and get on with it.”
The other kids smirked or shrugged or gave no reaction; a name’s a name, far as they were concerned. What’s important was that everyone had one.
“Right,” Bert said, getting his thoughts in order. “So Frank, who’s now an orphan in the mountains, takes his shovel and goes on the dig.”
Fat Mary dropped the rope she was pretending to untangle, her podgy hands mucky with tar. “He went on the dig? But isn’t that kids’ work?”
“He’s not that old, remember,” Bert said, animated now that he was getting to the good part. “But, yeah, he goes out on the dig, more than a few times from the looks of it, and comes back to his little room with all these bodies, right?” He turned the book around, pointed out the silhouetted torsos, arms, legs, heads. “Then he takes his sharp knife and cuts the lot of them up.”
“Big deal,” said Red Mary. “Doctor Dal does that all the time.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Less yapping, more picking,” came a gruff voice from afar. As one, the children stood up, forming a human curtain around Bert, giving him a chance to stuff the tome under his shirt before William Henry saw it.
The rest of the afternoon was spent tearing tar and gum from old ropes, feeling like the tacky stuff had glued their jaws shut. Bert fidgeted on the hard packed gravel, watching the Overseer nod on the stool he’d set close by. Just when it seemed the man had dozed off, he’d snort or fart himself awake, preventing any hope they had of talking. It wasn’t until sunset, after Miss Fiona clanged them all in for the evening meal, that Bert finally got to finish his thought. The children sat at a small table all their own, in a far corner.
“This bloke doesn’t just chop the dug-ups apart and have a good squiz at their guts the way Doctor Dal does,” he whispered. Crossing his arms and leaning close, he forced them to listen and listen good. More than ever, it was important they listened. “Frank figured out how to sew the pieces back together. You get what I’m saying?”
The kids were tired, eager to wolf down their meager rations and fall into a sleep they hoped wouldn’t be interrupted for a few hours at least. Millie’s nose was sunburnt, and Red Mary’s forehead was blistered and peeling. “No . . . What?” someone said, the words drawn out, edged with a fledgling whine.
Bert raised his eyebrows, his voice so low now they could scarcely hear him. “Frank got himself all the right bits, all the parts, and then stitched himself a new Da.”
When he told them the rest—about his mum, Mary Ann, how she’d heard tell of the disused cellar, how she’d got herself sent to the bin regular-like so she could dig; about the plans he had; about what they could create down there—they barely dared to exhale in case their pent hopes should fly away on the soft wings of their own breath.
With the scalpel poised a few inches above the corpse’s sternum, Dr. Dalkeith’s fingers shook. Either the sight of a First class cadaver rattled him—even pregnant, this one had been quite pretty, until the ravages of her final labor took their toll on her—or he’d hit the whiskey hard last night. Avice suspected the latter: another rejection from the hated, the beloved, journal in the India’s mail bag had arrived late yesterday, and the Surgeon had hidden for hours thereafter. The Matron resolved to have strong words with him once he’d recovered his equilibrium. Confronting hi
m wouldn’t be easy, she knew. He was a stubborn man, self-interested; she would need to appeal to his ego, dangle shiny possibilities, and make them seem like probabilities. A larger budget for his laboratory, perhaps. An upgrade in his facilities. At the very least, a new still.
On the opposite side of the operating theatre, the children sat in their ragged rows, eating the crusts of bread she’d not allowed them to take in the dining hall in the interests of starting the day early. Despite their nocturnal excursions they were alert and attentive, their eyes fever-bright as they watched the Surgeon at his work. It was this very absorption that made Avice suspicious. They’d lost interest in what was done here long ago; almost to a child, they’d suffered dissection fatigue from the sheer number they’d witnessed. Only Bert ever consistently paid attention, and she’d put that down to a prurient curiosity—a clear sign the boy was bound to meet a bad end.
Their engrossment was inordinate and it was, quite frankly, making it hard for Avice to be as heedful as necessary. Eyes reduced to slits, she burned the woman’s features into her memory. The skull was fascinating. Large and oval, broader at top than bottom by a great disproportion, the angle of the brow very, very slight, almost as straight as a wall. Heart-shaped, the Romantics would no doubt call this one’s face. Cherubic.
“Matron?”
She realized Dr. Dalkeith had called several times. His bushy brows were raised and his blade had advanced to the corpse’s gently curved widow’s peak. Mother, may I? She almost laughed, then gave a curt nod. The doctor peeled the hair away from the crown, the knife’s edge dividing flesh and bone. When he’d sawed through the skull and removed its neat little cap with the Liston, he smiled.
“The children might find this interesting,” he said, and instructed them to focus on the dead woman’s right leg. Slowly, he stuck a long, thin, metal probe into the mushy gray of the exposed brain. When two-thirds of its length had disappeared, he took a deep breath and jiggled it a little. Immediately the children recoiled, as though expecting the creature to twitch and flail on the table; but there was no such movement. Watching the Surgeon practically mash the woman’s brain, Avice’s heart fluttered, but she managed to keep her lips firmly closed.
“The nervous system can be manipulated after death,” Dr. Dalkeith explained in a tone pitched to convince—himself or them, though, Avice couldn’t quite determine. “Post-mortem corporal motion,” he twisted the rod, but the limbs remained idle, “is a reflection of the body’s former activities—a hangover from life, if you will. A man inclined to ride velocipedes, for instance, should have incredibly mobile quadriceps and triceps surae for hours—days, even—after his passing. A sheep-shearer should have enough strength remaining in his shoulders and back to roll himself over at least twice before being confined in his shroud. And a criminal . . . ” He paused to retrieve two more skewers from the tray, and embedded them beside the first. “A criminal, with her devious mind, her predilection for sneaking and snatching and throttling and scurrying . . . Well, her physique should tell the liveliest of stories—wouldn’t you think?”
The doctor didn’t look up; didn’t truly expect a reply. His monologue hardly skipped a beat when Bert piped, “Yes, sir. Yes it should . . . ” Instead, he merely nodded, and continued to insert spike after spike into the dead woman’s brainpan, until her head bristled like an echidna.
“Manual stimulus alone will not suffice,” he muttered, addressing, Avice suspected, neither she nor the children but listeners with no time for his life’s work, listeners on the far side of the globe. “As you can clearly see—” again he twisted and shunted the needles with no effect, “this one’s a dead fish. But.” There seemed to be an exclamation point after that word—But!—and the Matron imagined the man lifting his finger in a veritable a-ha! of discovery before he retreated to the shadowed end of the barn. Unoiled casters squeaked as he maneuvered an ancient wheeled table toward the light. On it sat a device Avice had seen many times, but never in use: a friction machine of some sort, she recalled him saying, with two upright spindles between which a large metal plate turned on a winch. When the doctor set it in motion, glints of sunlight reflected off the round surface as it spun on its side, like a Catherine Wheel. A smaller disc sat off to the right, connected to the larger by a flexible silver cord. Together the plates turned, getting faster and faster, revolving into a blur of energy.
“But with the addition of a rotating doubler—an electroscope,” he clarified, “or somesuch producer of electrostatic induction, we will find the difference remarkable.”
Positioned, as she was, behind the doctor, Avice could not see what sleight of hand he performed then—how he linked the device to the exhumed body—except for the scorched metal crimps he clamped onto the skewers protruding from the open scalp. There were wires curling outward, and a few switches at the machine’s base, one of which Dr. Dalkeith must have flicked. As the double-wheels increased their spinning, an incredible hum filled the air, a crackle that exploded in a sizzle of sparking pops—and there! There!
Bolts of blue fire, blue magic.
Liquid sluiced from the body. A stench of singed offal arose, so powerful that Avice was forced to cover her mouth and nose for fear of retching. The skin around its eyes and mouth blackened, the veins in its pallid neck shone ultramarine, its face had somehow grown more horrific than ever, afraid even, as the lids fluttered and the irises rolled madly—while its feet, its hands, the entirety of its lower body convulsed.
For a few seconds, no more, the woman on Dr. Dalkeith’s table had been resurrected. Her spirit and form arisen.
For a few seconds.
Perhaps.
As the smoke issuing from the skull cleared, Avice was no longer sure she’d seen what she’d seen. The body was slack, its wretched stink enough to conjure hallucinations. The face was scorched beyond recognition and the fluids pooling beneath the table were evidence enough that this—thing—was as dead as her own mother.
“You two, tidy this up.”
As the doctor turned away and began to rinse his instruments, Matron Welles couldn’t miss the look that passed between the boys tying on their aprons.
She narrowed her eyes. “Hurry. Prayer begins in five minutes. God may possess eternal patience, but Reverend Tanner does not. He will expect you, washed and quiet, in four.”
“I’ll help,” volunteered one of the Marys. Or was it the sole Sarah? As Avice had predicted, the little one hadn’t survived the night; she would be planted on the Isle at dusk with a few scant words from the parson. Mary, Sarah, Victoria, whoever it was—after a while, they all looked the same—got up, jostled to the end of the pew, and started to make her way to the Surgeon’s table.
“Wait for me,” said another Mary—yes, this one was definitely a Mary—chasing after her friend.
But the first girl was none too pleased to see her follower. A scuffle ensued as they pushed to be the biggest help, banging into each other as they vied for leadership. One elbowed the other, who in turn snatched the cap from her counterpart’s head, yanking hard on her pigtail. Slaps developed into wrestles, which collided with the bench holding Dr. Dalkeith’s instruments. Tools—clean and dirty—skittered to the floor, girls tumbling after them. Arms and legs furiously whirling, aprons loose and petticoats grinding into the sawdust, they rolled around—now one on top, now the other—taking out some childish frustration.
“Enough,” Avice said, voice sharp as her stern clap. “That is no behavior for young ladies! Get up!”
Again, she clapped her hands, startling the scrappers into submission. White-faced, they rose, clutching the folds of their skirts for dear life. On the other side of the table, Bert and Alf jolted, dropping bits of their burden. Between them, the corpse sagged like a half-empty sack of flour; its crown and heels dragged on the ground, arms flung wide. Slurry trickled from incisions, from orifices. As the boys shuffled to regain their grip, the body’s left foot twisted and tore off.
“Sorry, D
octor Dal,” Alf mumbled, collecting the appendage and jamming it into his apron pocket. Grasping more firmly around the knees, he scuttled quickly backwards, pulling Bert—clinging to the thing’s armpits, walking gingerly to avoid the mangled head—toward the wheelbarrow beside the workshop’s back door.
“Not to worry,” the Surgeon said, insouciant. “Her sufferings are no longer of this world. Death’s a better release than she could have hoped for.”
For reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, Avice found the doctor’s nonchalance offensive in the extreme. True, the woman was a criminal, but even so . . . Had someone stood over Hettie’s corpse and said such things? Surely, she thought, surely someone had shown some respect, some compassion—
“Don’t take her out now, you fools,” she snapped, looking up in time to catch Bert and Alf dumping the woman’s remains unceremoniously. “Everyone will be going to church in a moment; they’ll see you. Come back at twilight, before Labor’s end.” She inhaled, gathered her composure. “Or would you prefer they return early tomorrow, Doctor? Before lessons?”
Wiping his hands on a scrap of linen, the Surgeon seemed not to hear her. One by one, he gathered the fallen scalpels, picks, saws, pliers, and prisebars and polished them on the cloth before laying them out neatly on the tray he’d returned to the workbench. Brow furrowed, he crouched and did a second inspection of the floor, before straightening with a hand-drill in his grasp. He made to carry the lot over to the pitcher and basin, then appeared to change his mind when the peal of a bell struck up the call to prayer.