Chapter 6 #3
In fact, Victoria hypothesized that the resurrection would make the person immortal.
Her chest lightened at the thought. Perhaps he would serve as another father figure to Victoria—one that could help her when it was time to bring back her father.
Her chest pounded at the thought. To her father, this was a learning cadaver.
To Victoria, it was already alive: another family member and potential friend for her father.
When she closed her eyes, she could see the two old men bickering and laughing together.
The thought of her father having a friend filled her with warmth and relief.
He deserved a friend, and she ached for relief from some of the duties required of her.
She was eager to have someone to share the burden of figuring out her father’s disease and resurrection with.
Her father of course had a few friends already, unlike her, but none, she imagined, who would be as close to him as family such as this person.
She wasn’t sure why she almost always pictured the cadaver as being older.
Genetically, it was most likely to be a man, given his size, and the only men she’d ever met from Russia were old, academic friends of her father’s.
“Yes, I’ve only just opened the crate. You need to perform an initial examination. I’m afraid that it will need more maintenance and repair than I was first led to believe, but you will only gain more experience.”
Victoria followed Alphonse into the laboratory, trailing behind him in a way that reminded her of being a child.
The enormous pine crate sat atop a table, separate from the one they typically used, in the corner opposite Alphonse’s tidy desk and was within a straight line of sight from the table they typically used.
Tucked in the corner diagonally from the table was a small wooden desk, littered with beakers and stray notes Victoria recognized as her own handwriting.
“You’ve given me a desk,” she said with a wide smile. “And an entire corner. I feel so official now as your apprentice.”
Alphonse paused behind his desk and pulled out a green glass bottle filled with thick reddish-brown, nearly opaque liquid.
With a squeak, the cork was pulled free, and several drops were carefully added to a glass filled with a liquid that sat on his desk.
The scent of the sweetly resinous saffron and cloves pressed against her senses, and she had to lean against the sheet-covered crate to stay upright as the scent of cinnamon and cloves now violently turned her stomach.
Her stray hand gripped a massive log of ankle, and she glanced down, realizing there was no crate top under the sheet, only an enormous body.
She removed her hand slowly. Her dark brows pinched together in amazement.
“Yes, it’s just a small desk for now, something to put your things on until—” His gaze fell to the bottle. “Until it’s time for you to take over this desk.”
Victoria’s spine turned rigid at her father’s heavy words. She spun back around to focus on her father. “How long have you been taking laudanum? Why did you not tell me?”
Alphonse had always been firmly against taking anything for himself, even fighting soup or peppermint water occasionally when he was ill. She knew that if he was taking laudanum, things were worse than she knew.
The glass shook as he held it, causing the dark liquid to slosh around unsteadily as he lifted it to his lips. He gave her a reproachful look before draining the contents. “This is the first of, I’m sure, many future doses.”
Victoria turned back to the corpse, her hand still resting on the cold shin, lending her stability and the faint, imaginary feeling of someone else being there to comfort her.
Alphonse positioned himself at the head of the cadaver and nodded toward Victoria’s small wooden desk and the stack of empty leather notebooks before he pressed his spectacles higher up his freckled nose.
“You’ll want to dedicate a new notebook to your creation.
We have our work cut out for us, more so than I had expected.
Are you prepared?” he asked as his stuttering hands clasped hold of the white sheet still covering most of the cadaver save for a foot.
Victoria reluctantly removed her hand from the corpse and inhaled a large, calming breath.
She couldn’t wait to meet him. Obviously, it would be a while before he was alive and reciprocating her interactions, but it didn’t matter.
Hope, long missing, had lit an ember in Victoria’s cold, vacant chest, and if this old, battered man were the reason, she didn’t care.
She was thankful to feel something other than sadness.
Quickly, she went to the desk and collected the items she would need to log her assessment of the cadaver’s condition.
She took the spare moment to collect herself while her back was still turned to her father.
She tried to steel her stomach, irritated by the way her nerves and appetite were reacting to her anxieties.
She felt disgusting and uncomfortable in her own skin; it was as though her outside was mirroring the emotional horrors that plagued her insides.
Her stomach twisted and flipped; the pulse of adrenaline threatened to embarrass her further.
She’d worked on cadavers before, but never quite like this.
If she got sick in front of him, her father would think her incapable and feminine, unable to take over for him one day.
She needed to show him that a dead body meant nothing to her.
“I have rigged the table to move into that chamber. The machine for his current brain monitoring will rest under the table and will move with it.” He pointed to the bolted door in the cove of her office.
“It’s protected but goes to the earth and will keep the body cold enough, at least while we are in winter.
We may occasionally need to fill the chamber with ice from the lake and soak the body in alcohol to ward off decay as best we can. Are you ready to begin?”
Victoria moved to the side of the table so that she might see the cadaver’s face first. She wasn’t sure why, but it seemed respectful. “What shall we do in spring to prevent decay as temperatures increase?”
“If all goes well, I hardly think we will need to worry about that,” he replied with a smile.
“If we are as close to the correct procedure and formula to resurrect as I believe we are, then it will likely be done by spring. This body will be gone, swallowed back up by the earth. Until then, the machine we attach to his brain will send out neural signals to assist in slowing deterioration.”
Victoria’s skin prickled and pinched at the thought of losing someone else in her life, even if it was an old, dead man she had yet to meet—or build for that matter.
“But then if we are to be correct and successful in the resurrection of this person, which I am certain we will be, why would they be gone? Would he not be alive and with us in spring?” She watched the flame of the lamp nearby flicker in the reflection of his glasses.
If she looked him in the eye, he would see an emotional attachment that he shouldn’t.
A tickle ghosted her arm until she was forced to set her notebook down and brush her hands over her skin.
Something black dropped to the floor and crawled off.
A spider.
She lifted her foot without another thought and held it over the small, leggy, useless arachnid before she stilled her foot, watching the way it ran from her helplessly.
Alphonse scowled harshly at her. “This cadaver is for our experiments, not our pity. Though we may be capable of playing God, we are ill-equipped to fight the devil.”
Victoria slowly set her boot on the smooth stone of the laboratory floor, sparing the spider.
It hadn’t bitten her. For all she knew, it had crawled onto her seeking safety or comfort from someone it thought would protect it.
Only to be killed simply for being what you were born as.
Executed for the sin of being small and insignificant.
Victoria reeled back and looked at her father.
“What do you mean? You do not think we should resurrect others? Restore their lives? How can you say that? What—what would the point of all this have been if we don’t mean to use what we have learned?
” She wanted to scream. Yell. If she’d had the strength, she’d have flipped the heavy stone table over.
“What about you? If your illness should worsen, you will experience it. Would you not wish for a friend that’s been through it? ”
Alphonse’s face paled, and the sheet dropped from his fingertips.
“Victoria…” He shook his head slowly, an expression on his face as if he’d just seen a spectre.
“I told you long ago. You will not disturb my peace in death or your mother’s peace.
You cannot bring me back just as you could not bring her back. ”
Shock froze her face in horror. “Why not?” Victoria snapped.
“Disturb your peace? You will disturb my peace by leaving me! I will bring you back. You will see—you will see, Papa. Should something happen, you will be just as you were before; everything will be the same. We will test the methods and make certain they’re perfect!
You will—” The cold slap of a hand crossed her cheek.
She gasped. Her hand touched where her father’s handprint burned her cheek and jaw and swam into her very soul.
Her unblinking eyes latched on to the head and the outlined face of the cadaver beneath the sheet as she panted and struggled to catch her breath.
“I—I,” Alphonse stuttered. “Victoria, my child, I’m so sorry.” His palm trembled as he looked at it with horror.