Corpse & Crown

by Alisa Kwitney

  As Dodger gasped at the shock of pain, Wiggins cocked his head to one side. “Aw, there, there. Don’t look so glum, mate. Remember, ‘that which does not kill us, makes us stronger.’”

  * * *

  Dodger got stronger.

  * * *

  Days passed. Some of them were better than others, but even the best of them were bad. The dirt floor and stone walls of his cell let the damp in. A lone, barred window revealed that the room was below ground level, but if he peered up, he could see an inner courtyard where lines of white sheets were sometimes left out to dry in the patchy sunlight.

  He was still not certain where he was being held prisoner, or what his crime had been. Three other blokes were brought in to share his cell, but none of them seemed able or willing to talk. One, a rough-looking brute with a bald head and a patchwork of thick scars across his face, responded only in grunts and clicks. Another fellow, mummy-thin and leathery as an old boot, had a habit of nervously licking his lips when addressed. The most normal looking of the three had deep-set eyes and the shadowed, flat look of someone who had seen unspeakable horrors. He could say one word—no—which he repeated often, but only to himself.

  The guards—or porters, as they were called—were mostly nasty pieces of work, prodding him with their heavy wooden clubs and talking to him as though he were an idiot. “Pick up shovel,” they would shout, jabbing at him. When he didn’t instantly understand what they wanted him to do—shovel coal into the oven or remove old coals—they shouted more loudly and jabbed harder.

  Wiggins was the worst. For some reason, he liked to quote some bloke called Neecher.

  “Now, some might say that your situation is quite unfair,” said Wiggins one day as he ladled out the evening’s soup into their tin cups. “After all, what right have we to deny you your natural slumber in the earth? But that is what Nietzsche would call a slave’s sense of morality. Slaves tend to concern themselves with consequences. A superior man, on the other hand, has a will to power. There are different rules, you see, for the likes of you and the likes of me.”

  That left Dodger to wonder. Am I a slave? What sort of man am I now?

  * * *

  The next day, Wiggins escorted him up three flights of stairs into the laboratory—a room that looked like a cross between the large kitchen of a busy inn and an apothecary’s larder. A tall, posh, good-looking bloke named Victor and a lively young girl named Lizzie brought out a machine that made that awful, familiar whirring sound, and Dodger felt a terror so sharp it made the room tilt and spin. It took the two white coats a while to talk him down, but after a while, he began breathing normally again.

  “We won’t do anything until you’re ready,” said the girl in her flat Yankee accent, and even though he didn’t understand the rest of what she was saying—recalibration and magnetic field integration and bioelectric stimulation—he did believe that she was trying to help him.

  “It won’t hurt,” said the man. Victor. “I know it did before, but I swear to you, that part is over.” Something in the man’s eyes made Dodger believe that he was telling the truth, and he allowed Victor to hook him up to the machines.

  That was the first of several sessions, repeated over a course of several weeks. Dodger couldn’t say he enjoyed the way the machines made him feel—sometimes, they set his eyes spinning—but Victor and Lizzie talked to each other with an undercurrent of humor and affection that seemed to spill over into the way they talked to him.

  “He seems more aware,” said Lizzie, removing a clamp from his neck and dabbing some sort of ointment there. “How much do you think he understands?”

  “Not too much, I hope,” said Victor, making a note in a black, leather-bound notebook. “There’s a fine line between knowing enough and understanding too much. He’ll do better if he comprehends just enough without understanding so much he starts to ask questions.”

  Dodger hesitated. He had very few cards to play, and he hated to reveal his hand too soon, but it was irresistible. “Actually,” he said, “I do have some questions.”

  Lizzie stared at him for a moment, but before she could say anything, Moulsdale entered the room, panting a little. “And how is our little gutter rat turned show horse? Coming along nicely?”

  Lizzie and Victor assured him that Dodger’s progress was remarkable, while Dodger instinctively stared straight ahead. Trusting Lizzie and Victor was one thing. Trusting Moulsdale was a far thornier proposition.

  When Moulsdale left, admonishing them to hurry along so they did not miss a lecture, Lizzie turned to Victor. “Maybe we need to find a less public place to continue these treatments.”

  He got no answers that day.

  * * *

  It occurred to Dodger from time to time that he might be living in a loony bin. His cellmates certainly looked like lunatics, and he felt like one.

  Sometimes his head ached and he had dizzy spells that left him with the dazed impression that he had escaped his dark cell of a room and been transported to another place.

  One time he had been in a room filled with billowing clouds and long white robes—heaven, he thought, until he saw a red-faced wench wrestle a sheet out of a mangler while another, older woman stirred a steaming tub of laundry. Another time, he had thought he might be in quite a different location, as he had clearly seen a shapely female calf emerging from a stocking that was being rolled down to the ankle. That appealing show was cut abruptly short, however, and his distraction had earned him a cudgel blow from one of the porters who objected to how slowly he was shoveling coal.

  Stranger still, there were moments when he felt the flutter of some feminine presence in his head—his dead mother’s ghost, perhaps, visiting him from beyond the grave, or some sympathetic angel come down to comfort him in his hour of need.

  On the other hand, it was a lot likelier that he was simply losing his marbles. One day, when he was about to bite into the bit of moldy cheese that was meant to be his lunch, he saw a bizarre monster, like a deformed eyeless hedgehog.

  It was only when he flung the cheese away that he realized he had seen this creature before: through the lens of a microscope exhibitor who used to offer glimpses through the eyefinder for a ha’penny.

  “Behold,” the man intoned, “entire Lilliputian worlds inside a strand of hair, a handful of dust, a sliver of cheese.”

  “Cor,” said his younger self, “am I consuming those horrible mites every time I have a bit of cheese?”

  “What the eye cannot see, the heart never grieves,” the man had replied. So what did that mean now that he had telescope eyes and could see all the hidden monsters?

  21

  There was something new in Dodger’s schedule. After a week of Wiggins’s crude training sessions—a battery of chin-ups and push-ups followed by a timed climb to the top of a rope suspended from the ceiling—he was told he was to have a different instructor, Dr. Grimbald. Grimbald, a spare man in his late forties, had a handlebar moustache and some nasty-looking burn scars on his forearm, and his eyes were cold and distant.

  “Come,” he commanded, barking out the word as though Dodger were a dog before turning to stride down the corridor. He opened a door that led out of the hospital into a small courtyard. For the next hour, Grimabld never looked directly at Dodger, as if working with him were an unpleasant but unavoidable chore. Unlike Wiggins, however, Grimbald appeared to have specific skills in mind.

  He taught Dodger to crawl along the ground, head and elbows down, moving in small increments so that he barely seemed to be moving at all. He demonstrated hand gestures for words like attention, advance and withdraw. He taught him affirmative, negative and wait. There were other signs for objects like soldier, gun, horse and enemy. After rattling these off, Grimbald asked Dodger to do them again, from memory. Dodger was trying to remember the first word when Grimbald expelled a sigh and checked his pocket watch.


  “What’s the point? I might as well be talking to a monkey.” Apparently, this last comment was directed at himself.

  Feeling a spark of mischief, Dodger scratched himself like a monkey and made the appropriate simian noises.

  “Dear Lord,” said Grimbald, actually focusing on Dodger for the first time. “Can you understand me?”

  Dodger gave the signal for affirmative, and then, because it seemed silly not to, he added, “’Course.”

  Grimbald stared at him as though he’d grown an extra head. “You can speak!” Then, squinting as though he suspected a trick, he said, “Say something else.”

  Puzzled by Grimbald’s response, Dodger shrugged. “Like what?”

  “Uncanny.” Grimbald made a note in Dodger’s chart. “Well, now,” he said, giving Dodger an assessing look. “Seems we need to step up the pace.”

  After that, Grimbald seemed to take more interest in his pupil. In their next session, he brought a detailed picture of a field at the edge of a forest. “Look closely at this picture,” he instructed. “Now look at this one,” he said, holding out what appeared to be an identical image. “What has changed?”

  All Dodger saw was grass and a few fir trees.

  “Come on,” said Grimbald. “Focus. What’s wrong with this?”

  At first, Dodger was baffled. He had no memories of the countryside, something that made him five kinds of fool, according to Grimbald. But bit by bit, he learned. The next time they met, he spotted something. Sometimes there were skid marks in the grass—signs that a lorry had been driven there not long ago. Or else there was swamp grass in the field, where no swamp grass ever grew. That could mean a blind, concealing an enemy soldier. Dodger learned to spot when a tree at the edge of the forest was missing its top—a sign that a sniper had cut off the uppermost branches to use as camouflage.

  Mostly, Grimbald shook his head and looked disappointed. “It’s not enough to just see something better than the next soldier,” he said. “You’ve got to know how to estimate distances and interpret what you see. Is the target three hundred meters away? Or is it four hundred? Is the target shorter than average, which can fool you into thinking he’s farther away than he really is? You need to adjust for distance when something is up a tree—it’s easy for a sniper to overestimate.”

  A sniper. Were they going to ship him off to serve in some war on the other side of the world then? Grimbald refused to answer his questions. “You’re not meant to understand,” he told Dodger. “You’re meant to follow orders.”

  That night, Dodger couldn’t sleep. Staring up into the pitch darkness of his cell, his thoughts whirling, he found his eyes spinning. He closed them, and when he opened them again, the room was still—but he could see the shapes of his cellmates, like orange fires in the cool darkness of the room.

  All right, thought Dodger, his stomach churning with anxiety. Sod this. Nothing made any sense, and the not-knowing was worse than the worst thing he could imagine. The next time he saw Victor and Lizzie, he was going to ask some questions.

  Dodger tamped down the surge of excitement he felt as Victor and Lizzie led him out of his cell the next day. Instead of bringing him to the stairs that led up to the laboratory, they walked down a long corridor lined with hot water pipes that peeled gray paint like shedding snakes. They stopped in front of a dark green door where the word Storage had been clumsily painted over with the words Department of Neuroscience. A sign nailed to the door read, Please contact the superintendent before depositing items. No combustible chemicals, flammable items or perishables. Do not remove items without permission.

  Definitely a less public place than the laboratory. Which meant he had a good chance to ask his questions again—and quite possibly, get some answers.

  Inside, the room was a jumble of discarded furniture and oddities. A broken chaise longue, listing to one side, supported a burnt lampshade, a splayed-out umbrella with broken ribs and the skeleton of a two-headed calf. Nearby, a rusted perambulator contained a taxidermy dodo the size of a small dog, its expression as pathetic as its limp, dusty white feathers. Along one wall, a shelf displayed a series of mason jars containing miniature monstrosities, their stunted limbs and curled faces like something out of a child’s nightmare.

  On a lovely but chipped rosewood desk, Victor fiddled with two small copper-paddled wheels while Lizzie untangled the electrical leads. “Ready for the phrenologic mesmerator?”

  Dodger picked up the dodo, which was surprisingly hefty, before seating himself carefully in a chair with a partially ripped wicker back. Distracting himself with the stuffed carcass of the extinct bird, he allowed Victor to put a small device, like an earmuff, over each of his ears. On his right side, one of the paddlewheels began to turn clockwise, emitting a rhythmic pulse, while on his left, the second wheel turned in the opposite direction. Victor had explained the device to him—something about batteries and magnetism and alternating frequencies that stimulated communication between his brain’s two hemispheres. It wasn’t painful, but at first, the sessions with Victor had left him with headaches and a vague, unsettled feeling. Now, the brain-tuning treatments didn’t bother him at all—although they did seem linked to strange flashes of memory and those topsy-turvy moments when he felt as though he were looking out of someone else’s eyes.

  Dodger trained his eyes on the faded portrait of the queen as a young woman and tried not to worry about the fact that his brain wasn’t just being tuned—it was being reconfigured.

  “And that’s it,” said Victor, when a small alarm went off. “Your progress has been nothing short of remarkable,” he added as he removed Dodger’s earpieces. “I can’t believe that you’ve regained the ability to speak in less than a fortnight. And your dreams... Just incredible. Do you remember anything more today, Dodger?”

  Dodger shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Ah, well, the brain’s a mystery, and every injury provides us with another clue.” Victor began to pack away his papers and puzzles.

  There was a pencil on the desk, and Dodger picked it up with his right hand and idly began to pass it from finger to finger. “You said something about the brain and injuries. Did I have an accident?”

  Victor paused, then closed the case. “Yes. You were injured—badly, I’m afraid. And I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but you didn’t make it.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You died.”

  Dodger let the pencil drop from his fingers. “I’m missing something.”

  Victor tugged at his cravat as if it were constricting him. “I know, it sounds a bit unbelievable.”

  It sounded insane. “Are you trying to tell me—what? That this pokey little office is the afterlife?”

  “No, of course not.” Victor’s foot jiggled the table. “Elizabeth? Maybe you had better jump in here.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “It’s better coming from you, Victor.”

  Dodger folded his arms. “Let’s go back to the part where I died, shall we?”

  “I should have planned this out better, but when I came back to myself, I sort of pieced it all together on my own.” Victor snapped and unsnapped the buckles on the leather case, revealing his discomfort with this topic. “Of course, I already knew all about the reanimation procedure, so that was an advantage.”

  Suddenly, old memories came flooding back. Visiting Aggie in hospital, sneaking into Moulsdale’s study—and receiving the injection that left him awake and aware of everything said and done to him in the operating theater, but unable to move a muscle or speak a word.

  Bloody hell. They said they were going to turn me into a Bio-Mechanical, he thought, his mouth going dry at the memory. Yet here he was, in some sort of prison, perhaps, but hardly a mindless hulk of rotting flesh. He looked down at his hands and arms—they seemed unchanged. Had they changed their minds about him? Then he ran his hands over the sid
es of his neck and felt the cold metal. Electrodes. They had turned him, then.

  A sour taste filled the back of Dodger’s throat. “Oh, cripes, you’re saying I’m a corpse walker.”

  “You’re a Bio-Mechanical,” Victor corrected. “And a very special one at that. In two weeks’ time, you’re going to meet the Queen of England and the Emperor of Germany. You, out of all the Bio-Mechanicals in England, are going to represent the best of what our government can accomplish.”

  Dodger pulled off his flat workman’s cap and scratched his head, befuddled. “I’m a bloody show pony? Is that what all this training’s about?”

  “It’s very important,” said Lizzie. “The kaiser is bringing his best Bio-Mechanical, and the two of you will be pitted against each other in various tasks. It’s like the Olympics.”

  “The what?”

  “Modern version of the ancient Greek games?” Victor seemed astonished that Dodger hadn’t heard of it.

  “That’s not important,” said Lizzie. “What matters is this—you’re meant to convince the kaiser that British technology is superior to his and that there’s absolutely no point in starting a war, because his side would lose.”

  Bloody hell, thought Dodger. Maybe he wasn’t the one who belonged in a loony bin. Maybe the rest of them ought to have their heads examined.

  “I don’t know,” said Dodger. “Strikes me that when a bloke is looking for a fight, he always seems to size up his opponent and think, yeah, right, bet I can take you, even if the fellow is a bruiser twice his size.”

  “That may be true of a pub fight,” said Victor. “We are talking politics on the world stage.”

  Dodger sniffed. “Whatever you say. And you’re certain I don’t need to actually fight this triumph of German engineering?”

  “No one’s going to want to risk their newest model of Bio-Mechanical soldier in a fight,” Victor assured him. “There will just be a demonstration of skills and strength.”