“No rigor…”
“No coagulation…”
“You can still feel vestigial warmth. Feel for yourself, Harrup.”
“It’s almost as if…”
“I say! You don’t suppose…?”
I heard the shiver of surgical steel on skin. Much closer now. Far too close. I smelt the iron scent of blood, my blood. So strong because it was immediately beside and beneath my nostrils. They were working on my head, Mr Tumbley! Can you imagine?
I heard a sound of rending and splitting – separation. They were peeling off my face. My nose was covered with my own forehead. I could smell the inside of my eyelids. But I could see. I could see faces and whiskers and I saw the satisfaction on the face of the distinguished gentleman who had removed mine.
I had ceased to think in any rational or ordered way. All I had now were flashes of insight. One such told me with absolute certainty that they would next take off the top of my skull. Reach inside and lay hands on my brain.
The idea was appalling beyond my capacity to convey. What they had done so far was horrific, but to actually manhandle the brain, the seat of everything that makes us who we are, that is the ultimate transgression.
Instinctively, without any hope of success, I put every last pathetic shred of energy that remained to me into trying to move my eye. Either eye would do. These barbarians were doctors, were they not? Surely they would see a muscle twitch and realise what it meant. And indeed they did---
---to an extent.
“Did you see that?” one asked. “The medial rectus? I could have sworn---”
“Vestigial reflex,” another drawled. “Same as the warmth. Same phenomenon.”
Then a third voice, younger than the rest, almost a precocious schoolboy in tone. “I say! Would you chaps mind if I…?”
They minded – “This is not one of your ruddy frogs, Scrivener” – but not too much. I heard several withdraw and one approach. The face that filled my vision was clean-shaven with a long narrow nose, a weak mouth and receding chin. His hair was dull, plastered to his bulbous skull with too much oil. He struck me as an earnest seeker after knowledge who never have dreamt of doing what he was about to do had he even the suspicion of---
But he had no such suspicion. And he did what he wanted to do.
He focused his eyes with such concentration that they almost crossed. His lips fluttered soundlessly. I deduced that he was talking to himself, seeking to stiffen his resolve. I saw something fly across my field of vision, something attached to a wire. Another flew in the opposite direction. I heard exposed flesh compress somewhere between my eye and my ear. The same again on the other side. The callow youngster disappeared from view. There was scuffling, some grumbling. Come on, come on – we haven’t got all night…
Then came an almighty thunk. I not only heard it, I felt it. I experienced every physical sensation I had ever known, all in the same instant. Every sense returned to me. I smelled the stench of the charnel house, heard the sizzle of blood where the wires were attached. I felt the pain – searing, livid pain – of every wound they had inflicted upon me. I saw half-a-dozen eminent surgeons reel back in horror as I sat bolt upright on the dissecting table, levered myself off, caught a foot in a loop of my exposed intestine and pitched forward towards them, all the time berating them, though they probably could not discern what I was yelling because of the flayed nose in my mouth, between my teeth: I’m alive, you fools! Alive!
I held up my hand. Stapleton paused, granted me a moment, then enquired: “Do you wish me to stop?”
I shook my head emphatically. I wanted to hear him out, felt sure I needed to discover what happened next. After all, I couldn’t be any worse than that image in my head of him, skinned and punctured, lurching about the anatomy theatre wearing his guts like a bloody skirt. He had recovered, obviously. I put it to him: “They made it right? They healed you?”
“Oh yes, they put me back together. Guthrie, when he was President of the Royal College, told me that surgeons had learned more from my restoration than they had ever learned from hacking up the dead. A fat lot of good it did most of those present on the night. They were right to believe that typhus dies with the body, but I hadn’t died, had I, and they had been elbow deep in my disease.”
“Still,” I ventured gamely. “Your mother must have been pleased.”
“My poor mother could not come to terms with my return. She did her best – she nursed me devotedly until I was my own man again – but then she became distracted and had to be looked after in her turn. In the end my father sent a servant from India to escort her home. My grandfather bought me this house but never visited or corresponded thereafter. My family were people of faith, Mr Tumbley, and my continued existence contradicted everything they believed in. They did their duty, behaved honourably, but then… His voice quavered. I sensed his grief. He sipped the last of his water and resumed. “Likewise my friends and colleagues, those I had served before my illness. They moved mountains. They arranged for me to meet privately with the Lord Chancellor. The Act was reintroduced to the Commons. The College of Surgeons withdrew their objections, the bishops in the Lords abstained, and Royal Assent followed within the month. I was appointed the first Inspector. There have been others since, perhaps as many as twenty, but only I continue. You have no doubt worked out how long I have served and what age I must now be. Perhaps it was the nature of the electrical shock I received. Perhaps it was the effect of electricity on the typhus, or vice versa. I am a scientific experiment in progress, Mr Tumbley. Who knows how long it may continue?”
Who knows indeed? What I do know is this. Thirty years have passed since the interview I have described here. The Queen-Empress, the wonder of the world, has turned eighty and has ruled for more than sixty years. Yet Edward Stapleton, who the registers of St Sepulchre’s in Holborn will show died before Victoria came to the throne, still walks the gardens of the Inner Temple – wearing blue spectacles now, which enable him to bear the sunlight – and tips his hat at the occasional rheumatic dotard who still remembers his singular history.
“The mention of the galvanic battery … recalls to my memory a well-known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London, who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831, and created, at the time, a very profound sensation wherever it was made the subject of converse.”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial”
###
About Roger Wood
Roger Wood has graduated four times from three different English universities. He is a doctor of drama.
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Also by Roger Wood
TWISTED TALES
PATASOLA, a tale of infatuation, possession and parasites in beau monde Paris.
“I awoke this morning with the realization that I am losing my mind.”
Dr Gaston Daladier’s friend and patient, the famous author G, has died. He has left Daladier a legacy – journals which start the good doctor on a quest. Soon he begins to wonder – has he caught G’s madness? Or is something else – something much more dangerous and exotic – invading his dreams and corrupting his body?
RAZORBACK, a tale of the weird and unnatural on the Yorkshire Wolds.
“If nobody tells you, how can you know?”
The arrival of the twins tore a massive hole in Stephen’s young life. Uprooted from London to a self-sufficient smallholding in Yorkshire, taken out of school, ignored by his mother, unable to bond with his submissive father, Stephen is truly alone. Then, just before he turns sixteen, his father falls ill and Stephen has to take on a man’s role in the wider world. And now, for the first time, his assumptions are challenged.
THE CARNACKI CONTINUUM
&n
bsp; Based on characters created by the legendary pioneer of supernatural horror, William Hope Hodgson.
THE SAIITII MANIFESTATION
“You could not call it a reunion, Jessop thought. A reunion was for formal associations whereas their gatherings had always been informal and sporadic. Outside the flat in Cheyne Walk they had scarcely known one another. Jessop, now he came to think of it, had no clear understanding of how they had come together in the first place. Now, of course, the flat was gone. Its lessee Jessop had not seen for the entire four years of war. Would he turn up tonight, he wondered – Carnacki – at Taylor’s yellow brick villa in Putney? To be honest, answering that question was Jessop’s sole motivation in accepting the invitation. It came on a postcard, the invitation, which Jessop considered a nice touch.”
THE RELICT
“The words came so fat they overlapped, sometimes loud, sometimes no more than a whispered syllable. Flick recalled Neville’s question from earlier. Was this the voice of a man or a woman? She tried to determine. Impossible – the voice was neither male nor female. It was sexless, like a thought. Do thoughts have gender, she asked herself. Do men and women have different thoughts? Does this voice I am speculating in, inside my head, have identity of any kind?”
The Relict takes up the story where The Saiitii Manifestation left off. The heirs of those who vanished in Putney come together in Carnacki’s old flat in Chelsea. The portal opens, the invisible horde invades, and an answer – of a sort – appears.
The download also includes Part I of WHH: Scenes from a short life, a critical biography of Carnacki creator William Hope Hodgson.
MEDIEVAL NOIR
SAVAGE COMPANY, a novella on Amazon Kindle.
We all know the legend. The question is, are these the real men and women behind the legend?
“THIS EDWARD IS NOT MY KING!”
Violent times breed violent men. In the third decade of the Fourteenth Century even kings can be murdered without consequences. The killers of kings rule in their stead, sleep with their queens, and suck the kingdom dry. Honourable men are driven into outlawry.
Eustace Folville considers himself an honourable man – yet for the sake of his honour he ambushes and kills an Exchequer Baron.
In the forests and wastes an alternative outlaw society flourishes, with thugs and schemers and captains and even kings. James Cotterell is King of Peak, leader of the Savage Company. The Sheriff is powerless against such men. But there are men with greater power.
The outcome, inevitably, is bloody.
We all know the legend. The question is, are these the real men and women behind the legend?
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