Corpse & Crown

by Alisa Kwitney

  “But why are they spinning like that?”

  “No idea. Lizzie should be down here soon, but she wanted to check on Aggie first.”

  The creature closed his eyes and began to pant like an injured animal. “Um... Victor...the way he’s breathing...is any of this normal?”

  Victor made another note in the chart. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one actually wake before—and I don’t have any memories of what I did when I first became conscious again.” He waited a beat, and then added softly, “I don’t suppose any of this could ever be called normal.”

  Something in his brother’s voice made Will turn to look at him. “Don’t you feel normal now, Victor?”

  Victor met his eyes. “No. I can pass for normal, but I’m an aberration.”

  I’m different, too, Will longed to say. For one absurd moment, Will thought about telling Victor about his feelings for Byram. Perhaps Victor would even understand.

  Yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Perhaps, if they had been closer before Victor’s transformation. But it had been years since they had slept in the same nursery bedroom, and in many ways, his brother felt like a stranger who already knew too many of his embarrassing secrets.

  The creature made a sound of distress, his head moving in a circle, like a stunned calf awaiting the killing blow. On impulse, Will reached out to him, placing one hand on his forehead to calm him. Now the spinning metal-and-glass eyes focused on Will and the creature took a deep, shuddering breath. Its eyes settled like a roulette wheel finally coming to a stop.

  Will looked steadily into the boy’s uncanny eyes, hoping his tone would reassure him, even if he could not comprehend the meaning of his words. “Welcome to your new normal.”

  19

  The first forty-eight hours after Aggie’s surgery passed like a fever dream as she drifted in and out of sleep. Her eyes were bandaged to prevent any inadvertent rubbing and she was told to remain lying on her back, keeping as still as possible. Aware of Justine in the iron lung beside her, Aggie didn’t want to admit how trapped she felt as she slipped from memories to dreams and back again.

  Sometimes Justine talked to her, mainly about politics, which sent her off to sleep again. At other times, Shiercliffe or one of the other nurses woke her to put drops in her eyes. Some of the drops burned, but this was to be expected.

  At one point, Dodger came by to take her on a guided tour of the East End, but wound up getting them both lost in a maze of narrow, winding streets as a fog rolled in, obscuring everything.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m blind, anyway.” He turned to her, revealing marbles where his eyes ought to have been.

  She woke up in a cold sweat from that dream, only to find Dodger sitting on her bed. “You’re not dead,” she said. “I dreamt you were dead.”

  “Me? Nah,” he said, taking off his top hat. “Never happen. Want to know why?” He pulled an eye out of his hat, then another, and held them up to show that they were all Bio-Mechanical eyes that could blink at her from the palm of his hand. “I got eyes in the back of my head.”

  She woke up with a shout, then lay there, feeling her own hands and throat, trying to decide if she was in another dream.

  The bandages came off, and at first Aggie assumed the transplant had failed, because her vision was as blurry as it had been before. “Be patient,” Grimbald told her. “It will take at least a few weeks to see any improvement. As long as you’re not experiencing any new pains, we’re considering this a success.”

  She was allowed to attend lectures again, wearing a pair of dark tinted glasses to shield her eyes, but not permitted to read or take notes. She kept the tinted glasses on all the time, even though they dimmed all the colors in the room and made her feel as though the world was permanently stuck at fifteen minutes before sunset. They protected her eyes, and that was more important than seeing colors.

  After a fortnight, Aggie thought she noticed a slight sharpening in the outlines of things, and Grimbald proclaimed her well enough to remove the stitches.

  Then, to her dismay, he ordered her back to bed rest for another twenty-four hours. She compromised by resting in the recovery room for an hour, and then removed the bandages from her eyes and began getting dressed. Lizzie knocked and opened the door to the recovery room without waiting for a response, making Aggie clutch her petticoat to her chest.

  “Oh, thank heaven,” she said. “Thought you might be Grimbald for a moment.”

  Lizzie walked over. “Turn around and I’ll do up the back of your corset. I didn’t expect you’d be up and about so soon. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. I couldn’t bear just lying there another minute.” Aggie sucked in a breath as Lizzie tied her corset strings.

  Lizzie stepped away, frowning. “Wait a minute—you were cleared by Grimbald, right?”

  “He’s got other things to attend to.” Aggie went over to the wardrobe and removed her lavender overskirt. “Besides, I know how to take care of myself. I’m keeping my dark specs on.”

  “Have you taken a look around without them yet?”

  Aggie removed her blouse from the closet. “Not yet.”

  “Well?”

  Aggie focused on doing up her shirt buttons before responding. “All right.” She sat down in the room’s only chair. “Let’s do it.” She pulled the glasses away from her face, and watched light and color return to the room. Everything was so sharp and clear that she felt a little dizzy.

  “How is it?” Lizzie asked.

  “I think... I think it may be clearer than before the accident.”

  “That’s incredible.” Lizzie looked down at Aggie, shaking her head in wonder. “No one would ever know they weren’t your eyes. Except for the color, of course.”

  Aggie brought her hand up to her face. She had avoided mirrors since the first operation. “The color? But that’s impossible.” The cornea was a clear lens covering the colored iris of the eye, and transplanting it shouldn’t have changed the color of her eyes.

  “I’m afraid it’s not. Here, take a look.” Lizzie grabbed a hand mirror from the side table and held it up to Aggie before she had a chance to respond.

  Aggie stared at her reflection in shock. “My eyes are dark.” Before, they had been a clear, pale green. Now they were brown—no, on closer inspection, they were a mixture of brown and green. “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe the eye drops have darkened the iris?”

  “I suppose it’s possible.” Peering more closely at herself, she had another, completely unscientific thought: Dodger’s eyes had been dark brown.

  Suddenly, the room began to spin like a roulette wheel, and Aggie grabbed for something to steady herself before losing her balance. She heard Lizzie’s startled shout, but the sound seemed as if it was coming from far away. She felt as if she were tumbling down a long well, and then she landed in a dark, damp room with a packed dirt floor.

  * * *

  “Don’t get up yet,” said Lizzie, holding the cool compress to Aggie’s forehead.

  “I’m fine. Just hand me my spectacles?” Lizzie placed them in Aggie’s hand, and a moment later, she was looking at the recovery room through the familiar filter of the gray lenses. “There,” she said, standing up. “No dizziness.” Bed, side table, small watercolor of a sunset—everything was where it ought to be.

  “I really think we need to get Dr. Grimbald in,” said Lizzie.

  “I don’t want to waste his time, when he has so much on his plate right now.” It was the perfect excuse. With less than a fortnight before the kaiser’s visit, there was an air of contained panic among the hospital staff.

  “I don’t care what else he has to do. You fainted.”

  “It was just the blood rushing to my head.” Aggie didn’t understand herself exactly what had happened, but she did know that it had felt as thou
gh for a moment, she had been looking out of someone else’s eyes. “Please, Lizzie. Don’t tell Grimbald about this. It was a fluke, nothing more.”

  “A dangerous one. What if you had hit your head?”

  Aggie smoothed back a lock of hair that had fallen out of her bun. “You’d yell at me even more.”

  “Very funny.” Lizzie picked the cold compress off the chair and placed it near the basin. “You’re not a machine, you know.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  Lizzie made a noise halfway between exasperation and laughter. For a moment, Aggie considered telling Lizzie the truth about what had happened. The only problem was, it sounded so insane. No, it was insane. Clearly, her mind was playing tricks on her.

  Lizzie put the back of her hand on Aggie’s forehead. “Well, at least there’s no fever. Why don’t you lie back down in bed and I’ll fetch you some lunch?”

  “I’m fine sitting here in the chair till the nurse comes back,” said Aggie. “And please don’t think you need to babysit me. I know you have to get back to your own work.”

  Lizzie smiled a bit ruefully. “I must admit, I am curious to see how our Dreadnaught is coming along. His progress has been pretty remarkable—he’s learning to speak even more quickly than Victor did. I think it must be the new electro-cranial stimulation protocol.”

  Aggie tried to look enthusiastic as Lizzie launched into a complicated explanation of brainwave frequencies and how they impacted the endocrine system. “That’s fantastic,” she said. “Keep me posted.” It was only when the door clicked shut behind Lizzie that Aggie allowed herself to sink into the chair and succumb to exhaustion.

  Maybe something did go wrong with the transplant, she thought.

  No. It was a hallucination, she told herself. Some aftereffect of anesthesia or guilt or both.

  Groaning, she closed her eyes and wished she could just go to sleep for a week.

  But they aren’t your eyes, she thought. They’re someone else’s. They’re Dodger’s. Somehow, she would have to learn to live with the guilt of that so she didn’t wind up losing her mind.

  20

  He wasn’t sure what was real and what was a dream. Had there really been a whirling merry-go-round room filled with dead bodies and a fair-haired boy with kind eyes? No, that must have been the drugs. A witch of a nurse, dressed all in black, kept giving him injections of some bright green liquid that burned as it made its way through his veins.

  There were other things they did to him, as well, things that made his muscles twitch and then convulse. He tried to keep his eyes open, but the light hurt too much for him to keep them that way for long. There was a sound, a hum of machinery that increased to a whirring whine, and then a tingling, stinging wave went through his whole body. Worst of all, his eyes felt as though they were spinning in their sockets.

  If it was a dream, he wanted to wake up. If it wasn’t... Well, then. He wanted to dream something else.

  * * *

  He took a mental inventory of his injuries. First and foremost, his eyes felt dry and scratchy, as if someone had thrown sand in them. Opening them took an effort he couldn’t muster very often. His head ached, too, and so did his neck and chest. There had been a fight, presumably. Or an accident. Maybe he’d been run over by a stagecoach. He sure felt like he’d been trampled by multiple horses, but he couldn’t recall any details. Maybe he could ask one of the people who came into his room to poke and prod at him and make brusque, incomprehensible comments. Problem was, he couldn’t keep his eyes open long enough to get a good look around—the light was bloody painful—and once his eyes were shut, he kept drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to grab hold of something to anchor him in place but always slipping back under.

  “Extreme photosensitivity,” said a man who sounded like a drill sergeant. “Why the hell were there no bandages covering his eyes when he woke up, Victor?”

  “Sorry, Dr. Grimbald. Must have been an oversight,” responded Victor.

  “I must have expected too much of you,” said Grimbald. “Next time, I’ll spell everything out.”

  Something dark and cool and moist was placed over his eyes, and he fell back into the cool darkness.

  * * *

  When he surfaced again, he was burning up.

  “His temperature is spiking. Postoperative fever.” That voice—stern, female, older—raised a prickle of alarm along his skin. That was the witch nurse.

  “We don’t have the time to waste nursing him like an infant,” insisted a man with a posh, deep, rich baritone. “He needs to get used to those telescopulars in time to train for the exhibition. I want him up and about in the next forty-eight hours.”

  No one asked him what he wanted. To know his name, for starters. To know what had happened to him. And last but definitely not least, to know what they wanted to train him to do.

  * * *

  Sometimes he remembered fragments of things, like walking with a pretty redhead through a maze of dark streets and narrow alleys.

  “And who are you meant to be then?” The redhead’s accent was working class, from the north.

  He doffed his top hat and executed a courtly bow. “The Artful Dodger, successful man of business, at your service.”

  That name. It felt like the clue to a riddle, a jacket plucked out of a secondhand pile that fit like it was custom made.

  Except he hadn’t managed to dodge whatever twist of fate had landed him here. Maybe he was the Artless Dodger now.

  * * *

  This was a dream. He was pretty sure it was a dream, at any rate, because he was a child again, and he had a sense that he hadn’t been a child in a while. He was clinging to his mother’s cooling body in their icy basement flat. He wasn’t shivering anymore, and the part of him that was not a child knew that this was a bad sign. The room was so cold that he could see his breath, and he had been lying still for hours. The fact that his younger self was no longer feeling chilled was a sign that his body was starting to shut down.

  Someone was pounding on the door, and then there was a crash.

  “Ugh,” said a man, pulling a handkerchief over his mouth. “They really are like animals.”

  “Worse than animals,” the other had replied, his lip curling. “Even dogs know better than to cuddle up to a corpse.”

  He didn’t speak much English, but he understood a fair amount—and the word for corpse was the same in both languages. But his mother couldn’t be dead. She had promised she would get up in a minute. “Just let me rest a little, Yakov.”

  He tried to explain to the men that his mother wasn’t dead, just sleeping, but they pulled handkerchiefs over their faces and pulled him away from her. Standing over her, he could see how pale she was. Her skin had a waxen look, and there was something stiff and strange about her mouth. He should never have let her rest for so long. At one point in the night, she had made a gasping, rattling sound, deeper and more desperate than her usual snores when she took too much of her medicine. Stupidly, he had been relieved when it stopped. He should have kept shaking her, forcing her to keep her eyes open—but in the end, it would not have changed a thing. She had let go of him long before he had let go of her.

  Dodger opened his eyes and the memory vanished. I’m cold, he thought. That’s what made me dream about that day. Then he realized something else: his eyes were open, and there was no more discomfort. Shivering, he sat up on the thin straw pallet, pulling the threadbare gray blanket over his shoulders. He was in a windowless room with stone walls and a dirt floor—a poorer room than the one from his dream, and that was saying something. Dodger’s stomach growled, making him aware that he hadn’t eaten in... Wait, how long had it been? He couldn’t recall. In fact, he realized with dawning shock, he couldn’t seem to recall much of anything that had happened before waking up in this cold prison cell of a room.

  T
here were voices coming from outside the door to his room.

  “And how is our newest patient?” The speaker had a deep baritone and sounded somewhat familiar.

  “Oh, ’e’s fine, Professor Moulsdale. Asleep, most likely.” There was the rattle of keys as the door was unlocked, and then two men walked in. One wore some sort of navy-and-scarlet uniform and had a thick, gray-and-brown walrus moustache and thin, wire-rimmed spectacles. The second man, presumably Professor Moulsdale, wore an expensive suit tailored to hide his girth. He had a pale, doughy face and small button-black eyes that gleamed with satisfaction as he stroked his neat Vandyke beard.

  “He’s awake,” he said, sounding pleased. “This bodes well for recovery.” Nodding at the guard, Moulsdale said, “Mind you take good care of this one, Wiggins. He’s our prize specimen, and we have just under eight weeks to get him in top-drawer condition to impress the kaiser.”

  That rich baritone voice, thought Dodger. I know it. How do I know it?

  “Don’t you worry, Professor,” said the guard. “I’ll whip him into shape.”

  “Tell me something,” said Moulsdale. “You’re a former navy man, aren’t you, Wiggins?”

  “Boer War,” said Wiggins. “Was going to make sergeant, but there was a bit of bother about a girl.” He did not explain what sort of bother.

  “Well, then,” said Moulsdale, as if he had not heard. “You know how to get a soldier in shape, correct? So, there will be a few bob extra in your pay packet if you bring the subject along in his training more quickly.”

  Training, thought Dodger. What kind of training do prisoners get in this place?

  Then the door to the cell was closed and Dodger was alone with the guard. “Right then,” said Wiggins, taking his nightstick off his belt and smacking it across his palm. “First lesson—pay attention.” Without warning, the nightstick lashed out, slamming into Dodger’s thigh.