Chapter 6 #6
Her screams rippled through the laboratory when squirming maggots spilled out of the fresh cut.
Victoria fell to the floor, trembling as she struggled to remove her gloves and toss them to the floor with the clinging maggots. Her body curled in on itself, rocking back and forth slightly as she struggled to regain her composure.
“Aaagh!” she shouted at the heavens, more from anger than fear.
“I am damned.” She stumbled to stand, panting as tears fell from her eyes yet again.
“I am as damned as you!” Her shouts flowed over the still body as she shifted her gaze to the man.
“Yet, unlike me, you have been granted peace in death from your damnation. Well, not for long,” she said sharply.
“If I cannot be the God that brings back my mother, then I will be the devil and bring you back,” she shouted at the lifeless body and the maggots moving on his throat.
“Even the devil had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone. I have no one to share my pain.” She wiped her tear-streaked face with the back of her hands and went to work removing the maggots and placing the body into the cold chamber.
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“Now see here,” Alphonse muttered in a low, thoughtful voice as he used the trocar’s sharp end to point at the swollen abdominal cavity the next day.
“See this bulge? This is not stored energy; it’s the gut bloating with its own decay.
” A wet crack echoed off the cold stone walls of the basement.
A slow spray of yellow-gray fluid hit the floor.
The foul stench of rot filled the air along with the distant sound of rain.
“Suppose there were a way to replace it? Before it decayed?” Victoria pressed her father before she pulled the small linen cloth from the basin of vinegar water she held and wiped it over the deceased woman’s face, closing the woman’s eyes as she cleaned the dirt from her skin.
She wiped up the ichorous fluid from the body and floor, let the linen swell back in the basin of vinegar water before crossing the woman’s arms respectfully across her chest. Victoria’s steady hands pulled the ivory covering over the body as her father mirrored her actions on the other side of the woman.
Victoria had a regular role in assisting with the minor details and tasks of her father’s surgeries: handing him tools and keeping the patient strapped down, cleansing them, and with the recent testings, administering aether sulphuricus—the results of combining alcohol and vitriolic acid, which worked to knock out the patient and allow for longer work times, a concoction that Victoria and Alphonse had discovered together.
The iron bell at the castle gate rang with a harsh, insistent clang that reverberated through the storm-darkened courtyard. Victoria’s breath caught in her throat. “Another one,” she whispered. “That is three today, Papa.”
Her father’s face fell. “Go upstairs, tell Rosamond to fetch the Leichenbestatter to handle this corpse. God willing, he won’t be needed for another body tonight.”
The bell tolled once more, eliciting a harsh swallow from Alphonse.
“You’re exhausted.” The excitement had left Victoria’s voice, replaced with irritation and concern.
“Vivo,” he said, Latin for I’m alive.
“You won’t be if you continue working like this when your tremors are acting up,” she snapped.
With a low grunt from Alphonse, the two moved the body to a small alcove by the door to wait for the undertaker. Her father straightened his back with a grimace. The stillness of the room made the jerky shakes of his arms all the more prominent.
“Papa,” Victoria said firmly.
Her father tried to hide the tremors from her, had promised they didn’t hurt him, even when they grew to be so violent in his legs that he was incapable of walking properly.
He refused to discuss them with her. It had been a part of his life for years, but the more tired and full of worry the old man grew, the worse his tremors were.
He struggled to unfold the linen square in his grip, swearing under his breath.
Victoria was suddenly there, pulling the fabric from her father’s hands and opening it with a loud flap.
Alphonse allowed his daughter to help with surgeries, but only help.
Despite her pleading to take more patients on her own, it was too dangerous.
“Victoria—”
“Papa, you will give him the aether and we will use the eye coverings; he will not know that I am even the one doing it. When they wake, there will not be a single trace of me. They are at the back gate now. If the bell continues unanswered, they will only move to try the front gate.”
Alphonse slumped until he sat on the edge of the cold stone slab with closed, heavy eyelids. The small blue veins of his thin lids were visible, and there was still a small jump in his right hand.
“You know I don’t like you working on them unless they are already dead or close enough to it you would remain unseen.
Should a man see you in this environment—” His face reddened as he whipped his head side to side.
“Victoria, your reputation would be ruined, the town would shun you. You are not fast enough to ensure that you wouldn’t be seen yet.
You would be viewed as morally corrupt! Both of us would be put out and the Frankenstein name turned to filth. ”
The low sound of the bell rang twice this time.
“No one will know but us.” Victoria’s voice softened.
“I’m turning them away. I am too tired, and you are not ready to do anything alone.
Go upstairs; there is a study on fossils that I purchased for you on the library desk,” he said as he moved to the first door of the laboratory.
“And I’m hiring an apprentice. I cannot do this forever, and you are not ready—or I am not ready to risk the costs of you being seen, and perhaps I never will be. Go upstairs.”
Victoria nodded somberly and did as she was told.
Once upstairs, she watched from the window.
Rain lashed the stone, turning the courtyard into a slick labyrinth of shadows.
The bell’s metallic cry cut through the still night like a blade, summoning something she had feared yet always expected.
This exhaustion would eventually take her father from her.
Down below, three figures struggled through the downpour as her father approached.
“I am sorry, but I cannot help you!” he shouted against the pattering rain. “Until my apprentice arrives, I cannot assist you. There’s a doctor in Locklande!”
“You cannot be serious. He’s going to die,” shouted one of the others.
Victoria pressed her face against the cool window as she struggled to hear.
“No, I’m sorry. Like I said, I will have an apprentice…
” Her father’s voice drifted off with the night shadows as a strike of lightning brightened the sky, lighting the face of the injured man.
“Wilhelm,” he mouthed and the others seemed not to notice.
That changed everything. He couldn’t refuse this man.
Her pulse thundered in her ears as the rain plastered their coats and pale, terrified faces. “Take him through those doors and down the tunnel. At the second set of doors, set him on the floor and leave,” Alphonse commanded.
“He’s losing so much blood!” one cried frantically, voice trembling over the wind. “We couldn’t wait…had to bring him here. If the baron finds him…” His words fell into the night, unfinished, leaving only raw, desperate panic behind.
On the stretcher lay Wilhelm von Lichtenmarstein, the baron’s heir.
His overcoat was soaked and clung to him, darkened by crimson blood that leaked through the fabric and a large open wound on his stomach.
His face, pale beneath the wet strands of hair plastered to his forehead, was slack and unseeing.
Even from her vantage, Victoria caught the metallic tang of iron in the air, suffocating and sharp, a scent she knew too well.
It coiled in her chest, tightening with dread.
“Leave. Return in six hours’ time and not a moment earlier.” Her father’s voice, taut and commanding, echoed off the castle walls, bouncing back like an echo in a tomb.
The friends leaned close to the stretcher, panic etched into every line of their faces. “He…he was hunting. Wouldn’t let off a boar. We found him barely alive.”