by Ian Weir
I looked at her closely. She didn’t seem opium-addled just now, though of course you could never tell for certain with those long sunk in the habit. She clutched her glass of pale in both hands, gazing down in such fixed distress that you’d think she could see the events of that night, reflected in the surface like the portents in a Gypsy’s crystal.
So: she’d crept down the corridor, to prig a stoppered brown bottle from Atherton’s surgery. I pictured her reaching towards the cabinet, in the twisting light of her candle. Then the sound of the carriage — Miss Deakins freezes — voices from outside draw her in fearful fascination to the window.
“And what did you see?”
Miss Deakins closed her eyes. She drew a quavering breath, to steady herself.
“Miss Deakins?”
“I saw an arm.”
“An arm?”
“Rising up.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
But I had begun to guess. The first cold intimations commenced to spider up my spine.
They’d been busy about the body, she said. The corpse in the loft, upon the table. They’d been doing . . . things. Odenkirk, and Mr Atherton.
“What things?”
She could not say; she did not choose to imagine. Then they stepped back. There was a sudden flash of light; it lit the loft for a flickering instant, and she saw them revealed like players upon a stage. Then the arm rose up.
“The dead man’s arm?”
“Yes.”
“They raised the dead man’s arm?”
“Oh, no. The dead man raised it himself.”
It should have been midnight as she told me this. We should have been wreathed in yellow fog. She leaned closer, her eyes fever-bright.
“He lifted his arm, Mr Starling. He reached out. Like a lost soul reaching from the grave.”
“And then?”
“It fell.”
The arm fell back down. But there was another flash, and it rose again. The fingers moving this time, clenching. Miss Deakins saw commotion from the others, in that flash. Dark figures herk-a-jerk.
“And then?”
“There was another flash.”
“The arm rose up again?”
“No, Mr Starling. Oh, no. Poor dear Mr Starling.” If that were all, an arm, then Miss Deakins might yet hope to sleep again. “The third time, he rose up.”
The man who was lying on the table: he lurched perpendicular. Sat there in the flash of light, and then turned his head. With hair on end and eyes like eggs, he stared across the night at Phyllida Deakins.
“And then he shrieked. Oh, Mr Starling. Oh, that cry . . . !”
Such a shriek of desolation as would haunt her the rest of her life, through all the nights that lay ahead; it would pursue her through all the winding byways of this world, and hound her gibbering at last — she swore it would — through the gates of Bedlam Hospital. Such a shriek as would not be heard again until the dead rose up at the end of days to face the Awful Reckoning. As she clutched my wrist with both her hands, it grew clear enough to me now, if ever I’d doubted it to begin with: Flitty Deakins was mad. Deranged, and an opium addict into the bargain — a woman beset by green-eyed Hindoos on the landing.
But what if what she said was true? The question whispered itself with a scrotum-tightening intensity.
“What happened afterwards? The man sat up, you say — the corpse. You say he looked at you. But then . . . ?
I trailed away. Miss Deakins was shrinking as she gazed past my shoulder.
I turned to see a man lounging against a wooden post behind us. A long grey man with a smile slashed across his face. “Why, ent this just the prettiest pair?” drawled Odenkirk.
Mr Comrie was in his surgery that night, jotting in his case-book. He stopped as he realized what I was telling him, and closed the book slowly.
“And you are — what — amused by this?” he demanded.
I suppose I’d been chuckling a bit as I related the tale. The way you do when you’re not at all certain about what you’ve heard, and even less about how it will be received.
“No,” I said lamely.
“Then extinguish that smirk, and say what you came to say.”
So I did. He stared at me fixedly ’til I’d finished. A clock ticked louder than any clock had done before, since the invention of Time.
They’d lodged together as chirurgical students at Edinburgh University years previous — the two of them, Atherton and Mr Comrie. They’d been friends of a sort, even good friends, difficult as it was to imagine, and friends of a sort they remained to this day, though I don’t suppose that ever made them equals, certainly not in Atherton’s eyes.
There was silence when I finished. Hammer blows from the clock.
“An attempt to revive a corpse,” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“According to the Deakins woman.”
“Assuming we can believe . . .”
“Exactly. Laudanum, and green-eyed Hindoos.”
“True.”
“And one of the rising surgeons of London.” His mouth pursed sourly. “Anything else to tell me, William?”
I felt a fool, by now. But in fact there was more.
“Threats were implied,” I told him.
“Excuse me?”
“His man came in on us — Odenkirk. Warnings were intimated.”
“Threats upon yourself?”
“And Miss Deakins.”
“In so many words?”
Not exactly. Odenkirk had in fact waited ’til Flitty Deakins had fled the Duck and Dolphin, then pulled up a stool beside me. “What’s she been telling you — eh, friend Starling?” he had asked. “The Deakins, with the red rag flapping in her gob.” His head cocked in a just-between-us way, his smile a slash of comradeship. “Well, here’s a word to the wise, as between two friends. Whatever she thinks she seen and heard — she didn’t. She’s an opium-fiend. A slave to it and a thief, poor soul, and a lying bitch besides, though it grieves me to say so. So whatever it was she said to you just now, you’ll keep it to yourself. Yes? You’ll forget you heard it in the first place, friend. Cos I have a fondness for the filthy lying slut, just as I have an amiable regard for you, and how distressed I would be to see you come to harm.”
I gave Mr Comrie the gist. His eyes narrowed like clamshells as he listened, and when I was done he grunted.
“One would see his point, consairning the source of your information.”
“So . . . we do nothing?”
“Of course we do something, William. You will fetch my bollocking supper, if you’d be so good — a meat pie from the Black Swan, and a half-pint of brandy. And I in my turn will consume it.”
Reopening his case-book, he turned his back and sat as he had done when I came in: straddling his stool, scritching with his quill and scratching with his free hand at an armpit, as elegant as a stone shed in a knacker’s yard. And there behind him stood Wm Starling, Esq., squelched and smarting.
*
The first question is simply: what is life?
This was currently the subject of much debate amongst medical men, and broadly speaking there were two camps. In the first were the Hunterians. John Hunter had over his long and illustrious career come to believe in a Life-Force, carried in the blood, which was the source and spark of existence. It was not clearly defined, but very obviously this Life-Force must be something akin to a Soul. Hunter had advanced the theory late in his own life, when even the most rigorous men of Science may develop Mystical Leanings. But it continued to exert great influence, this theory, and over the past winter the surgeon John Abernethy — a disciple of Hunter’s, and a fellow Scot — had delivered an acclaimed series of public lectures upon the topic, at the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
In the other camp were the Materialists, disciples of a Frenchman named Bichat, who held that the Life-Force is just as actual as the faeries in the wood, and that life itself is n
either less nor more than the sum of the physiological functions by which death is resisted, full stop. The Materialist view had most recently been trumpeted by William Lawrence, a former student of Abernethy’s now risen to the post of Demonstrator in Anatomy at St Bart’s. This spring he had delivered his own series of public lectures, gibbeting Mysticism and his old teacher with it.
This leads to the second question: when is a man actually dead? It is a question far more vexed than you might suppose.
Oh, there are signs that anyone may observe. A man is dead when he commences stinking, and his widow puts on her weeds. He is dead when his friends exaggerate his virtues, and the maggots go about their business. But what constitutes the very moment in time when a man passes from one side to the other?
The absence of respiration? Surely not, else many had returned from the dead. Not six weeks earlier, I’d watched Alec Comrie resurrect a child who had drowned in a rain-swollen ditch. She’d been dead fifteen minutes at least — a little girl, lying cold and blue on a tavern table as Comrie, fetched from his dinner, came bandy-legging in. He chafed her limbs and wrapped her in blankets, for the first thing was to warm her. Then he lifted her from behind and squeezed his fist hard into her stomach, just below the breastbone, at which she dribbled brown sludge and then spewed out ditchwater, retching and opening her eyes. Amidst wonderment and jubilation she wept and called for her sister, who was subsequently discovered at a gin-shop two streets over, batting her glims at a sodger.
Or was death the stoppage of the heart? But hearts had been restarted. Hanged men’s hearts had done so on their own — men pronounced dead by the attending surgeon and cut down, only to splutter back to life at the foot of the gallows. I could tell you of another man, two days deceased, who sat up on the dissecting table in the Death House at Guy’s Hospital, croaking in consternation at the anatomist who was just about to cut.
All of which led to a third, and darker question. Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx — once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness — might Science yet summon him back?
Attempts had been made. An Italian named Aldini had tried just a few years previous, right here in London. His uncle Luigi Galvani had experimented upon dead frogs, hooking them with wires to voltaic piles and running electrical current through them, and Aldini went one better. He tried to galvanize a human corpse, a wretch named George Forster who had drowned his wife and baby in a canal and was crapped for it at Newgate. Aldini took possession of the body — one of the four hanged felons granted by Law each year to the Royal College of Surgeons for scientific examination — and conveyed it to a nearby house, where preparations had been laid.
Three troughs, each containing forty copper discs and forty more of zinc. Incisions were made in the cadaver, and metal rods connected. With members of the Royal College looking on and a crowd thronging round the house, swelling by the minute as word spread, Signor Aldini applied the electricity. The first surge caused Forster’s jaw to quiver, as if he should groan aloud and blurt some dreadful message from the Undiscovered Bourne; he opened up one ghastly eye and stared. A second application caused him to raise his hand and clench it, while moving his legs and thighs, like a man who would be on his way directly if he could just get his stampers beneath him. Nothing more dramatic could be achieved, though many in the room had turned quite pale as the subject’s phizog gurned. Aldini could still provoke movement three hours later by applying current to the ear and rectum.
*
“But of course,” said Dionysus Atherton equably, “it was nothing but scientific enquiry.”
“Or so Aldini maintained.”
“You read his paper, Alec, just as I did. It was an exercise in stimulating the muscles. Aldini never dreamed of bringing back the dead.”
“Did he not?” Mr Comrie cocked his head. The declining sun was directly behind Atherton, irradiating him in its golden glow, and his friend was forced to squint looking up at him. “I know what he said, Dionysus. But I can’t say for a sairtainty what any man dreams. Can you?”
Atherton laughed a little. “Perhaps not. No, not for a ‘sairtainty,’ as you say. And it is true enough that men have dreams.”
“Some of which would frighten the Devil in Hell.”
“The Devil in Hell? Poor Alec — there’s your Northern boyhood, rising up to clutch you by the ankles. All those Sundays in Kirk, hemmed in by Calvinist aunts.”
“And yet.”
“And yet what? Why are we standing here, debating Signor Aldini’s dreams?”
“You made the attempt yourself. Two nights ago.”
Atherton had been about to start away, towards a carriage that had just been hailed by Odenkirk. Now he stopped, and for just an instant stood quite still — almost as still as Your Wery Umble, whose jaw had commenced dropping with Mr Comrie’s first words, and who now stood clutched by the queerest commingling of glee and foreboding. I had assumed the subject was definitively closed after my attempt to broach it two nights earlier. Evidently not.
“Who’s been telling you such tales?” asked Atherton after a moment. Addressing his friend, but staring out of the sun at Wm Starling.
“Do you deny it, then?” said Mr Comrie.
We were in the quadrangle in front of Guy’s Hospital, in the dying sunlight of an April afternoon. It was — is — a wide pleasant space, with the hospital on three sides and the clatter of St Thomas’s Street outside the gate, and a statue of Thomas Guy the founder standing in the middle, wearing an expression of furrowed benevolence. Students streamed past, some of them bound for Guy’s sister hospital St Thomas’s down the road, or else — more likely — for one of the many taverns hereabouts. Above us all, in one or two of the windows on the wards, a wan face might be glimpsed gazing out upon light and life.
Atherton had been lecturing that afternoon. The lecture concluded, students had flocked to him like sparrows to a feeder. I worked my way through and managed to slip him a note scrawled in my employer’s hand: Mr Comrie’s compliments, and could Mr Atherton spare a moment? He never acknowledged my presence as he took it, but after a minute or two I saw him glance at the contents, and in due course he excused himself from the sparrows.
Mr Comrie was waiting by the statue in the courtyard. “No word yet, I’m afraid,” Atherton had announced without preamble. “But I expect to hear directly.” He was assuming the Scotchman had come regarding a possible position for him here at Guy’s, as a demonstrator in anatomy, one afternoon a week. Comrie had asked Atherton to speak a word on his behalf — a favour it had wrung his pride to beg.
“Never fear,” Atherton continued, cheerfully. “We’ll have this resolved soon. And the very next morning, we will take you to a tailor — a real one, Alec, with two good eyes and opposing thumbs and four fingers on either hand, instead of the blind amputee you would appear to patronize. By God, that coat of yours would humiliate a dustman.”
Mr Comrie had muttered a stiff appreciation. Then, as Atherton prepared to depart, he had bluntly and without warning changed the topic. Now he stood awaiting Atherton’s reply, squinting into the sunlight, and looking scarcely less stony than Thomas Guy himself.
“Eldritch. That was the man’s name?”
“It was.”
“And did you do it?”
“Of course,” said Atherton, almost carelessly.
“Attempted to resurrect a corpse?”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“What would you call it?”
“My duty.”
“And you believed him to be dead?”
“I knew that he was in a desperate strait.”
And it occurred to me: what else had I been expecting him to say? Here in the quadrangle at Guy’s Hospital in the last light of an April afternoon, with laughter and voices all around us, and London churning about its business, and Odenkirk sloping up behind us gaunt and grey — what had Your Wery Um
ble Narrator been thinking? That a surgeon should deny having tried to save a life?
“But did you think him dead?” Mr Comrie demanded again. Clearly this had disturbed him considerably more than he’d let me glimpse, and he was not a dog to let go if once he set his grip. “Fountain Court — that’s where it happened? All the way to Crutched Friars. Must have taken half an hour. More? I’ve brought back souls who were all but drowned, but that was a matter of minutes. Half an hour — an hour? — that’s something else. That’s trying to resurrect the dead.”
“And what exactly have you heard?”
Again, looking straight at me. As was Odenkirk, from a little distance away. His eye had pig-sticking in it.
So I answered.
“I heard an experiment took place,” I said. “In the stable, behind your house. I heard electrical current was employed.”
Mr Comrie looked back to Atherton. “Is this so?”
“I tried to stimulate a choking victim’s heart and respiration,” he replied.
“After he’d been dead for — what — an hour?”
“Fifty-three minutes, by my chronometer.”
“And of course you failed.”
“I have made arrangements for the funeral,” said Atherton. “Is that sufficient reply?”
“D’you intend to try again?”
“On Bob Eldritch, do you mean? No, I think not. He’s lying in Bowell’s back room, Alec, with his jaw swaddled shut and pennies on his eyes. I suspect poor Bob is beyond the reach of Science. I suspect the time has come to let him rest.”
“You know what I’m asking.”
“He leaves a widow and two young children. We’re taking up a subscription for their support. Perhaps you’ll want to contribute.”
“D’you intend to try again on someone else?”
“Of course. At the very next opportunity.”
Mr Comrie’s mouth had tightened to a thin white line. Atherton laughed out loud.
“Look at you,” he said. “As dour as one of your Calvinist aunts.”
