The Intuition: Part 8, The Anatomist
A Horror Story
Navigation Page
Afire with warring thoughts and alarms, Will made his way back to the gentlemen’s smoking parlor. He needed to speak with Tom and tell him of their strange scholar. The wrongness he had felt on the train platform had only deepened and now thrummed along his bones in a song of danger. His hand in his coat pocket caressed the grip of the little pistol he carried. It was some comfort, and yet what he wished for were his knives, rolled in canvas and stowed with his bags. Somehow, he felt, when things went pear-shaped, they would do so at close quarters, hot and stinking of blood.
He found Tom asleep and snoring in the arms of his Scots mistress, the tumbler rolling on the carpet and the decanter empty but for vapors. Will clenched his fists, then bent to retrieve the glass and set it on a table. Falke was gone. For all he knew or cared, Tom had indeed flung the doctor into the waning night. He left the compartment and slipped down the corridor to his suite, casting a glance at Borja’s door across from his. He would have to speak with the man, but not tonight. The weight of sudden weariness rode his shoulders.
Within, his compartment rivaled his accommodation at the Imperial Hotel. A dark and dusty bottle without label or mark stood on the dining table, the cork pulled and laid at its foot. The rich aroma of the wine hung upon the air like an invitation. Will drew the pistol from his pocket and placed it beside the bottle before filling the waiting goblet. Deep and sanguineous, the color of the wine sent a dull bolt of desire through him as he lifted it to his lips and drank. He carried the glass with him as he moved to the sleeping alcove where his valise sat upon the bed. He undid the buckles, reached inside beneath the clothing, and withdrew the roll of canvas and leather that held his knives. This he took back into the sitting room where he opened it to reveal the glittering smiles of the strapped blades and draped it across his lap as he sat drinking and dreaming.
London, East End, 1871
The anatomist had dwelled in half a derelict house in Commercial Street where he operated a clandestine surgery in his front parlor. Though he had gone by the name Dr. James Algood, he possessed no credentials. He had been driven from the latter part of his surgical training, and indeed, from the bosom of his sententious family, for unbecoming conduct, and had narrowly escaped being jailed.
Will climbed the creaking stairs to Algood’s rooms three days a week, rooms stuffed with books and papers, bones strewn across the tables, and Algood’s clothing flung about on chairs. The boy climbed toward the only education he would receive outside of the gutters and Big Hal’s butcher shop. In Algood’s apartment he learned grammar, arithmetic, geography, and history. He had the sound of the East End streets and beer palaces stripped from his tongue, to be replaced with a posh elocution for which he could see no use. This was his mother’s wish and her doing in iron-willed opposition to her husband.
“What you do in there, Billy,” Tom had asked him, side-eyeing the scabrous house with its shuttered windows. “Looks a right old coffin box. And that toff what’s school-mastering you, I seen him down to The Dilly chatting up the girls. They say he’s a dodgy one. Don’t get up to no slap and tickle with you, hey, boy-o?”
The Dilly was a dirty pub a stone’s throw up Wentworth Street from the butcher shop, its side alley leading to a brick-walled yard known as Back End. There, Big Hal often fought, strutting his crown as the clear local favorite, and swilled congratulatory ale afterward. Back End further served as a convenient trysting spot for the prostitutes who worked the pub trade but had no rooms of their own save for their nightly doss. Will’s mum forbade him to darken The Dilly’s door, but Tom, now a mature twelve years, found work there sweeping and scrubbing.
“Nothing like that, Tom. Mum says I’ll learn to be a gentleman so’s I can climb out of this sewer.” He shook his head. “Algood’s a dodgy lot all right, but he knows heaps.”
“Knows how to get a tumble with the Duchess, he does. I heard he got booted from hospital work for trying on the old rag and bone gig, only it were the croakers he was a-takin’ to market. On the sly, like.” Tom gave a sage nod. “But I says, if your mum wants to pay your way clear of here, we’ll take the egg. Study up, mate.”
Tom had slung an arm about Will’s neck and rubbed his head with dirty knuckles before ambling away to The Dilly. It had never occurred to Tom that Will would leave the East End without him, and Will supposed it had not occurred to him, either, although it made him sick and angry hearing Tom call Mum “the Duchess”. It was a nickname bestowed on her by the neighborhood whores in spiteful jealousy.
Mary Dovedale, already more refined than any of them could hope to be, was able to exercise an unprecedented choosiness regarding her clients. She had the dubious good fortune to fall under Big Hal’s promotion and protection and had a clean, warm space of her own behind the pub’s storeroom. Will knew she visited Algood each week in return for his schooling; indeed, he had waited once on the stairs while she paid his tuition and was barely able to look at the would-be doctor when he was let in to his studies.
When he had been attending his “classes” for nearly a year, an unsteady and wine-soaked Algood opened the door to him one late evening with a leer and dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “I’ve been told it is your birthday today. Come with me, lad. I’ll make you a present of a new line of study.”
The man leaned half upon Will’s shoulder and half upon the balustrade as they descended the staircase, his hot, sour breath at the boy’s ear. “You’ve an astonishing grasp of rough anatomy, William,” Algood slurred. The thick waves of his hair stood on end as though in fright, and the stubble of his jaw rubbed against Will’s cheek as he lurched and swayed on the steep flight. “I suppose it comes of being a butcher’s son. Let us refine your knowledge, eh?”
In the gloomy foyer, Algood paused to draw a stout key from his vest pocket. He favored Will with a glance of coy significance before crossing to a door that led to the cellar. He inserted the key; it turned smoothly and without sound, though the door’s hinges groaned in protest as he pulled it open. Algood stumbled down two wide stone steps to a landing where he lit a lantern that waited on a ledge. The flamelight bloomed and quavered over damp brick walls, illuminating ghostly veins and patches of nitre.
A subterranean smell—root and rot, stone and cold, dark earth—breathed out and fastened a chilly hand upon Will where he hung back in the safer shadows of the foyer. Algood turned and looked up at the boy, his lantern lifted high.
“How old are you now, William? Eleven? Old enough for the sacred mysteries.” His laugh held a high, wild note, and he waved Will forward with a brusque gesture. “Come. They’re waiting.”
“Ye’re pissed,” Will said. “I ain’t goin’ down that hole with you. What you got down there, anyway?”
“Your tongue is in the gutter, sir. Kindly elevate your speech as you’ve been taught.” Algood frowned at him. “I came upon a curious drama earlier this evening, almost upon my doorstep. It is a damn dark stretch here in the shadow of the warehouses, as you well know.”
The anatomist’s train of thought wandered a bit. “It was an accident of fate,” he muttered. “What devil plagues me?”
Without so much as another glance at his student, Algood turned and descended into the stinking darkness, the lantern’s halo wobbling against the clammy press of it.
“Follow, young William, if you would touch the face of divinity.” Algood’s voice rose from the echoing stairwell, hollow and soulless.
The cellar opened out into a squat, barrel-vaulted series of rooms, the ceilings low enough to drape their cobweb veils over the unwary. Will fought off one sticky festoon in the semi-dark as Algood went about lighting more lanterns and casting his rolling tones into the echoing chambers.
“‘Thou know’st ’tis common—all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity …’ that’s from Hamlet, young sir. If you are not familiar, I will remedy your lack.”
The anatomist fell to muttering, moving deeper into the cellar, kindling haphazard lamps and fat slumps of candles stuck to the floor by their own melt. From a flickering room to Will’s right, Algood boomed, “Behold!”
From the doorway, the boy took in the rough plank tables and the sheeted forms that lay atop them. Against the weeping wall, a bench supported enamel trays filled with frightful surgical instruments. The knives and scalpels winked in the lamp light, joyful in their promise of red deconstruction. Algood turned and appraised Will’s blank expression.
“I’m sure you have seen a corpse before now, William. Come closer and let me introduce you.” He twitched the sheet from the first body. A corpulent man, nude and grey in the leaping light, lay on the table like a felled steer. Will saw him as a series of macabre photographs, unable to process the totality of the dead man; his dirty fingernails, his bearded jowls, the splay of his thick legs, his flaccid member sheltered beneath the taut moon of his belly, the joyless sheen of his half-lidded eyes.
“What’s he doing here,” he asked, his voice raspy in his dry throat. “Who is he?”
He could not look beyond the corpse to the second sheeted figure. Algood stepped close to the table and leaned over the dead man, peering into the slack face as though seeking some hint of identity.
“I do not know the man,” he said. “He met his fate in the abandoned vestibule of the warehouse across the street, and it was not undeserved, though it was not I who gave him his justice. I brought him here, so that his sacrifice might not be wasted. There is much the investigation of his remains may teach you, my precocious pupil.”
Will swallowed the lump in his throat. “How’d he die, then?”
Algood looked up from his deep perusal of the man’s face and chuckled. “He ran afoul of a daughter of Eve. Thinking to have his pleasure for free, he would have choked his paramour into silence and been away, probably back to his waiting ship for he was dressed as a seaman. And look here.”
The anatomist held a candle over the meaty forearm of the corpse, illuminating a tattooed swallow. Will stepped forward, his eyes fixed on the inked bird in flight. He put out his hand and touched the cold flesh, his thoughts on the pair of swallows his father wore on the backs of his scarred fists.
“It’s a superstition among these men that the swallow will see them safely home from their voyages or their souls to heaven should they drown. Whether this one did its job is a question beyond my science. See here, where death entered.”
He pointed to a purple slash on the man’s inner thigh, the lips of the cut opening and closing in mute, flabby confession under the pressure of the anatomist’s fingers.
“He bled like a stuck pig, dead in little more than a few minutes, his hands still around his killer’s throat. He little thought she would have such a sting.”
“Is that her?” Will gestured toward the second body.
Algood, sunk in reverie at the edge of the table, roused himself. “Yes. What a job of work it was to bring them both here, William. But I could not leave them for the rats, for surely no one would have found them for many days. And now, here she is, the pretty little murderess. Come, see.”
He reached out and dragged Will by an arm to stand beside him over the body of the prostitute. With a flourish, he threw aside the sheet, disturbing the ringlets of the girl’s dark hair. As nude as her victim, she lay upon the table like one asleep, her eyes closed. The marks of the sailor’s hands colored her throat, but the rest of her glowed like pearl in the wavering light.
As Will stared, her chest rose in a staggered, shallow breath. He stumbled back from her, his flight arrested by Algood’s hand clamped about his arm.
“She’s still alive,” he shouted, and the syllables ricocheted in mad reverberations.
“Barely. She hasn’t long, was nearly gone when I came upon her and …” He waved at the dead sailor. “I have injected her with morphine. She is oblivious to all sensation, hovering on the threshold of Hell. No doubt its denizens detect the final agony of her heart. What must it be like, William, to be so suspended? Is she not beautiful?”
Algood released Will and ran his hands over the girl’s blue-tinged flesh. He caressed her breasts, ran his thumb over the slight parting of her lips, traced her ribs and mapped the bowl of her belly from hip bone to hip bone. His breath came in harsh gasps.
“Beautiful, and poised between worlds,” he growled.
His hand traveled down her thigh, and Will ran from the room, slamming the great oaken door behind him and falling against it. His heart clamored in his ears, wild and frightened. Behind the door, he heard the sound of warm flesh moving against cold; cruel life straining to touch the impending mystery of death.
Tremendous. You have captured the time period and language. Spot on. I'm trying to think of the right single, descriptive word for this saga. I've settled on enthralling. I'm all in on this one Liz. - Jim
So well done! These bits of Will’s history that lead to who he has become.