Chapter 39
TEN YEARS BEFORE
THE BUTTON MANOR
“Today I will be teaching you all an important lesson in guts. Henry, please fetch me a pail of rats,” Mr. Button said.
The seven children, all seated at their desks, squirmed in their seats at the mention of rats.
It was midafternoon on a hot July day, and while their peers were outside soaking in the sun and enjoying cones of soft-serve ice cream, the children were indoors in one of the Manor’s “laboratories,” being shown a dissection demonstration, as was done at this time every Thursday.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” one of the children, Evie, said quietly as Henry returned with a clear bucket of pale gray vermin. They could see all the rats squished together inside, their tails tangling around one another.
The secretary was wearing a pair of latex gloves, a green tinge to his own complexion as he placed the bucket down in front of Mr. Button.
“Thank you, Henry,” Mr. Button said, and then casually reached into the bucket and plucked a large rat out from its resting place.
The children watched in despair, disgust, and amazement as the old man lay the vermin down on its back and then proceeded to slap the rat on its rounded belly, before piercing through its skin with a sharp scalpel, splitting it open and allowing its insides to tumble out.
“Our lessons in dissection are meant to show you how delicate and trivial life is. This rat here might’ve been brilliant, but in the end it is no better than any of those other rats in that bucket.
It allowed itself to become prey.” Mr. Button grumbled the last part out as he began to remove the vermin’s insides, gutting it out with seemingly little to no remorse, like he had a personal vendetta against this particular rat.
A small brown hand shot up into the air as Evie stood up quickly. “Can I please be excused, Mr. Button?” she said, looking and sounding like she was moments from being sick.
Mr. Button paused his surgery, lowering his brow at the young squeamish girl before him.
Evie had been a new addition to the group, as had her brother, Adam.
They were the brother and sister duo that lived in the staff quarters—the only children who lived there.
There hadn’t been an explanation for why they were now a part of the Buttons’ lessons.
One day they weren’t there and the next they were.
Of course, Mr. Button had his reasons—he always had his reasons, and those reasons very often served his own interests.
Mr. Button sighed, staring pityingly down at the girl. “If you must go, then go, but this will be the last time that you get to be excused from these demonstrations, Evelyn.”
The girl didn’t waste any time before running out of the laboratory, covering her mouth as she did.
“Anyone else want to join Evelyn?” Mr. Button asked. There was silence, so he took that to mean that the rest of the children were perfectly fine with the cruel demonstration continuing.
“Where was I …,” Mr. Button pondered. “Ah yes, gutting. With this rat, we are going to learn the art of taxidermy—who here can define what that is?”
Immediately, a small dark brown hand pierced the sky and Mr. Button smiled down at the eager face of his eldest daughter.
“Folake, do you have the answer?”
Fola nodded. “Taxidermy is the process of stuffing animals to make them seem lifelike even though they aren’t alive anymore,” she said.
“Precisely!” Mr. Button replied. “Well done.”
Fola beamed at that, smiling wide in the way she always did when she knew she would be getting a gold star for her efforts.
“Now that I have prepared the rat, it is time for the stuffing process.”
Mr. Button took the heirs (and Adam) through the long process of the art of taxidermy. Mr. Button was rather fond of these stuffed dead animals; they were some of the first things a stranger might notice about the Manor when they visited.
Once he was done with the rat, he had made the children take a rat each and attempt the process themselves.
To his dismay, not all of his heirs seemed to be up to the task.
Octavius had thrown up and then fainted after accidentally stabbing the dead rat in the neck, its dark blood leaking out from the puncture wound.
Bilal had left too much of the rat’s guts inside and ended up with a poorly sewn-together mess.
Perdita refused to cause further harm to the rat, and sat out of the dissection altogether—which Mr. Button was not pleased about.
Fola, Romeo, and Adam were the only children from the bunch who managed to do a decent job. Fola was clean and efficient, Romeo slow but precise, and Adam, who was four years older than the children, managed just fine.
“Well done for your … efforts, children. Next time should be easier,” Mr. Button said.
“Next time?” Octavius repeated, his voice wobbling.
“Of course, next Thursday—we’ve got much bigger fish to fry.”
Octavius’s eyes widened. “We’re cutting open fish?” he asked, looking nauseous.
“Of course not, no! It’s a metaphor, and fish are lousy animals for taxidermy.
Next week we’ll be cutting into a pig and the week after that, a deer.
I hope to teach you how to correctly detach and reattach the antlers.
That is my favorite part of taxidermy, a process I hope you will all grow to appreciate. ”
No one spoke then, and they didn’t have to. The fear was woven onto every single one of their faces.
Even Adam looked frightened, and he was older than them and had seen a great deal more than the younger children had.
Adam and his sister, Evelyn, would sometimes go hunting with Mr. Button when their parents were too busy working.
Adam and Evie would watch as Mr. Button held his shotgun with pride, as he walked them into the clearing near to the Manor, angled his gun at unsuspecting animals, and took a clean shot each time.
They weren’t sure why they had to go, only that their parents said that making Mr. Button happy was going to ensure that they kept their jobs and that they would have enough money to later send their kids to school.
Adam had no idea what taxidermy, or lessons on dissection and hunting, had to do with university, but he trusted his parents, as children do.
There was, of course, a link between all of those things. A link that wouldn’t become clear until several years later, three years before the present day, where Adam and Evie would attend the seventh-annual Prodigy Ball as special guests of Mr. Button’s.
It wouldn’t be clear to anyone else until Adam and Evie would get on the stage and Mr. Button would unveil them like art pieces hung in the Louvre for everyone to gawk at.
“Everyone, meet Adam and Evie, the genesis of the Button Method. Before I adopted my four brilliant heirs, I had an idea to diversify my prodigy experiment by seeing if slightly different conditions can impact the outcome of genius. I first began work on Adam and then a few years later his sister, Evie, both of whom were generously loaned to me by their parents with the promise that I would turn them into pictures of excellence, and now … well, I’ll let them show you what they are capable of themselves. ”
There had been a round of applause as the siblings stepped forward.
Adam, then eighteen, was an archery prodigy. His aim, accuracy, and precision was at a percentage higher than many of the world’s greatest archers.
Evie, at almost fifteen, was a ballet prodigy. She was primed to be one of the world’s most revered ballerinas, dancing with the renowned Manhattan Ballet Company, but was of course being scouted by companies all over the world.
As they performed for the audience that year, no one yet knew that this would be Adam’s last Prodigy Ball. In fact, this would be Adam’s last of anything.
Mr. Button had his methods and his reasons for doing everything he did.
Though the dissection demonstrations were one of his more barbarous methods yet.
Having seven-year-olds gut animals had nothing to do with scientific knowledge or even the lost art of taxidermy.
To any bystander, it seemed nonsensical, and that was because it was never meant to make any sense at all.
The lessons in dissection were a practice of desensitization.
If the children got used to seeing such brutality done to once-harmless living things, then how could they recognize and spot when that brutality was turned on them?
That was the point, the cruel, twisted point. Mr. Button thought it was the most important lesson they learned while they were young:
That the world was brutal, and the rats were everywhere.