Hike
His classmates arrived promptly at nine p.m., the four of them still dressed in their fine suits from celebrating graduation. Victor opened the door to his landlady’s home and ushered them in.
“This all yours, Victor?” Gregor hung his hat on the hook by the door. Too familiar by half, but Victor let the impertinence go.
“My family is far away, so I rent. But my landlady is amenable to most things,” Victor replied.
Jonsi sniffed the air and seemed pleased, so Victor handed him a glass first.
“Champagne for the viewing,” he explained. “Put your coats on the backs of the chairs.”
Petyr raised an eyebrow at him. “Confident,” he said.
Victor smiled at him. “My lab is downstairs. Please mind your step. The railing is on the right.”
He watched as they removed their coats and gathered themselves together to follow him.
Victor had spent so much time looking at them all through his years of study, but never before did they look so young and innocent to him.
Foolish. Whispering among themselves, ready to mock him and witness his failure.
Victor knew things that wouldn’t even enter their dreams. Did it give him the right to look down upon them? Perhaps. But that was to be seen.
He led them down the dark staircase and into the lab. His patient was waiting beneath a sheet, bathed in the light of nearby candle and electric lamp.
The men behind him giggled nervously as they found their places in the circle around his table. Victor walked slowly to the head of the table and waited until their nervousness turned to discomfort, then silence.
“From the first day we met, you’ve viewed me as lesser,” Victor started. “I have been subjected to your scorn, ignorance, isolation, and rejection.”
Henry started to object, but Victor held up a hand. “Don’t . . . I’m not angry, and I’m certainly not here to punish you for that, I just wanted to say that I understand.”
Henry released an anxious breath.
“I understand,” Victor continued, “that my presence was a disruption to class, and I understand that my curiosity tires people.
It must have gotten old to listen to, and I cannot hold that against you.
But the way I feel about our study in alchemy, as irritating as it must have been, is that it is fruitful in ways far beyond what most of our contemporaries thought possible.
“We are entering a new age of science, stretching the possibilities of medicine in pursuit of a tomorrow greater than today. The cost of that is steep and the labor of it is high. So please, if you would accept my apologies for the struggle of these last few years, I would greatly appreciate it.”
Victor waited, but no one took him up on his offer. Gregor just crossed his arms and looked impatient.
Victor grit his teeth and scowled. They wouldn’t even allow him that false humility when it was they who would soon be apologizing to him.
“Fine, then. We may begin.”
He peeled the sheet down the patient’s body.
At the first glimpse of the patient’s long hair there was a horrified gasp, which settled into muttering curiosity as his guests realized with relief that Victor’s patient wasn’t a woman.
Elias lay there, colder than any living body should be, his breath shallow beyond detection, heart weak without the assistance of Victor’s devices.
As always, Petyr was the bravest of them. He strode forward and brushed an ungloved hand against the stitches, assessing the mock autopsy and feigned reconstruction, then looked at his fingertips.
“Iodine?” he asked Victor, then without waiting for an answer, he turned to his friends. “The body is cold.”
Victor opened his arms to allow them to view the body.
“Be gentle with it,” he said as they began their examinations.
“With him,” Petyr corrected sternly. He put a hand above Elias’s mouth to check for breath. Henry lifted Elias’s arm and let it flop down as far as the restraints would go. Gregor put his ear to Elias’s chest, waiting for a pulse so slow from a heart so weak.
Gregor hmmed, then snatched a scalpel from the side table and stabbed Elias deep in the shoulder.
Elias lay unmoving, and Victor’s heart sang.
“He bleeds,” Henry pointed out.
“Quiet,” Petyr snapped. He nodded at Victor to continue.
“Of course it bleeds. Please step away from the body so I can begin.”
Victor shoved the breathing tube down the patient’s throat, started the bellows for his blood and lungs, and flipped the switch that jolted his heart.
His classmates watched in a hush as the patient’s chest began to rise and fall. So good so far.
Victor picked up the blue book.
“What’s that?” Gregor asked immediately.
“The missing piece,” Victor replied. “The soul answers to words if you know the right way to ask.”
He waved a hand over his machinery and the patient’s moving chest. “I figured out how to sustain the body months ago. The brain needs blood, the blood needs air, the heart needs electricity. It’s not especially difficult if you spend any time listening in class, Gregor.”
Henry snickered, and Gregor shot him a scathing look.
“The soul, however,” Victor continued, “the mind as separate from the brain . . . They’re different beasts. I could keep the patient here for days, breathing and warm, feeding through a tube, but unless I bring the soul back to the body, it—he’ll lie here forever.”
“The risk of infection seems high,” Petyr commented.
Victor shrugged and lied. “This body is from the medical school used for anatomy study and education. What did you think the cuts were from? This body was already forfeit for the purpose of study. No one can get upset with me for bringing it back to life and killing it again. If it expires eventually, what does it matter? In the future, when we’re delivering stillborn babies alive and wailing back into their mothers’ arms, we won’t be waiting nearly as long. ”
“Taken from the medical school? Victor did you steal this—? Are you serious—?” Gregor started, but Petyr held up a hand.
“We promised we’d watch and not interfere, so let’s watch and not interfere.” He looked at Victor disdainfully. “Go on. Entertain us.”
Victor frowned.
He reached forward and pressed his hand to the middle of Elias’s chest. His ribs felt so thin beneath his palm and his skin was warm again. Victor closed his eyes for a moment, praying that this would end better than with the drunk, and began reading.
There was no water nearby for Victor to watch for vibrations, but the feeling in the air shifted nevertheless.
At once a weakness began to settle over him.
It felt like he was being pulled to sleep.
Like the ground would be welcoming if only he would lie down.
But the eyes of his classmates were shiny as they watched, so Victor grabbed the edge of the table tight.
The patient began to jerk, and his wounds started to bleed sluggishly from every cut. Henry stepped back with a noise of fear and disgust.
His terror spurred Victor on, renewing his energy. He leaned harder onto the patient and chanted louder, until this man’s back began to bow just like the drunk’s had. A thrum of fear filled Victor.
Victor sped up, but to his relief Elias didn’t arch dramatically and throw up all his insides. Instead, he seemed to take a large breath and then settle down flat. Then, before Victor’s eyes, he became even more sallow, as though his very life force was fading away.
Victor paused in horror and curiosity, then finished the incantation.
It was quiet for a moment.
Victor started to pull his hand away from the patient’s chest, but it felt strange, like pulling two magnets apart from each other. As soon as his palm was about twelve centimeters away, the patient’s eyes snapped open.
Victor’s classmates gasped and backed away from the table at once.
Victor whirled on Gregor. “You owe me.”
“Good God!” Henry uttered, crossing himself, eyes wild with terror.
The patient was thrashing. Not the feverish and unnatural bucking of the drunk but like a person afraid and enraged. The breathing tube was still down his throat. Horrible groans and screams, more animal than man, poured from him.
In the depths of his terror, his eyes fell upon Victor, and he stilled for a moment. Then with a strength that far exceeded his frame, the patient tore his arms free from his restraints, pulling the nails clean out of the table.
For whatever reason, Victor felt a wave of exhaustion pass over his body. His classmates, backed up against the wall, were looking to him to control the situation. Even Petyr did not have words for this.
“Be calm!” Victor shouted.
Elias did the opposite. Hands freed, he took a fascinating moment to wrap his arms around himself and shriek piteously.
A sound so loud, terrible, and shrill that it rattled the glass in the room and pulled such a feeling of despair to the surroundings that Victor did not stop his companions when they ran.
Fleeing the basement and also the building. Cowards, all.
“Be still!” Victor commanded, but reason was beyond this creature.
He was like the rats and cats Victor worked on earlier, eyes raving and angry, body focused on nothing but escape.
The monster felt around himself, tearing the heart machine away from him and hurling it to the floor. He ripped the breathing tube out of his throat with enough force that he spat blood, letting out that horrible wail all the while.
Victor stumbled back.
The patient gulped air, then curled in on himself and vomited black bilious fluid. It steamed hot and rancid in the air, and Victor covered his nose with his arm.
Not once since noticing him had the patient broken eye contact. It was hypnotizing and repulsive. Victor wanted to go to him, he wanted to run from him. But he couldn’t move.
The patient heaved yet again, this time a clear, watery fluid: saline or mucus. Then he took a deep breath.
His mouth moved, but nothing Victor could understand came out. For a moment, it was still. The patient brought a hand to his throat, realizing with new terror what he’d done when he removed the breathing tube with such recklessness.
Then, rage again.
Incandescent.
And in his eyes, hate.
Victor remembered himself. He snatched the blue book from the table, grabbed a candle, and fled.
His weakened legs did their job to get him to the top of the stairs before Elias could finish untying himself from the table and he seized his chance.
He tore the candle from its holder and set the top of the staircase alight and slammed the door.
He could hear the patient’s cries of despair and fury and knew he couldn’t let Elias leave this house alive.
Victor dashed upstairs to his rooms and grabbed his remaining money, letters from his family, diploma, and identification. He snatched the candle from the lantern in the hall and hurled it into the center of his bed, which burst merrily into flame.
He ran about the house, drowning out the sounds of the patient’s cries and his hands beating against the basement door with the roar of fire.
Victor stumbled out into the night and turned away from his sins.
Walked from the house that had once been his home.
He could still hear the commotion even as he left his neighborhood behind. The bucket brigades rushing to put out the flames, neighbors screaming, people running in the streets.
The orange glow of his landlady’s house haunted him until he put distance between it and himself and the night faded to a calmer blue. Victor walked to the east, to a terrible area, and acquired an extremely private room in an inn for cheats, whores, and thieves.
He lay down on a bed that smelled of flesh and sweat and closed his eyes.