Dark Embrace

by Eve Silver

  “Go on,” he said, a command.

  “And directly after the amputation I would have applied molding bread before the dressing.” There. She had said it. She waited for him to dismiss her words.

  Instead, he said, “Molding bread? Why?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound. Her chin kicked up. “My father learned the technique from a woman in Scotland years ago. He had traveled to Edinburgh to attend the anatomy lectures of Robert Knox and he stayed on to travel the countryside. The woman was a healer. The folk in her village both respected and feared her skill. She told my father the mold lessened putrefaction. She gave him a jar as a parting gift. When I was small, it was my job to feed it.”

  “Your job to feed it? Now there’s an image.” The corners of Mr. Thayne’s lips lifted. Sarah stared at his mouth. She had elicited that tiny smile. It was for her and her alone.

  She could not help but smile in return. “I added stale crusts of bread and the mold proliferated. When my father used it up in treatment, I fed it more bread.”

  He made a soft laugh. “An odd pet.”

  “It was,” she said, his laughter warming her even more than his smile.

  “And did the mold save your father’s patients?”

  “Some,” Sarah said as she glanced about once more. The matron watched her from across the ward, arms crossed, a frown clouding her features.

  Mr. Thayne followed her gaze and intuited the situation. With a dip of his chin, he said, “We will speak of your pet another day. I leave the patient in your most competent care, Miss Lowell.”

  His words shimmered through her, and she wondered if he knew how much she valued his acknowledgment of her skill. She knew she was competent. It wasn’t that she needed his validation, but acknowledgment was…nice.

  As Mr. Thayne turned to leave, Mr. Scully lurched up and caught hold of his frock coat, tightening his fingers in the material so that his knuckles showed white.

  “Please,” he begged, his voice slurred, as though he had already been well dosed with the gin Mr. Thayne had recommended. “Please do it for me. Do it quick. With a knife, or some other way. Fast and clean. This is a terrible suffering, and we both know they’ll only come again. What if you are not here to speak for me? What if they drag me to that table and hold me down and cut my flesh? I do not want to die that way, sawed into sections like wood for a fire.” He paused, and then said in a clear, ringing voice, “Kill me and be done with it. You know the way of it, Mr. Thayne.”

  A heavy hush fell on the ward. Many eyes watched the scene unfold and many ears listened.

  Mr. Thayne held the man’s gaze for a moment, his expression ruthlessly neutral. “Sleep now,” he said. Then he reached into his pocket, withdrew his bottle-green spectacles, and slid them on to hide his eyes.

  A mask, Sarah thought. A wall.

  With a groan, Mr. Scully loosened his hold and dropped his hand back to the sheets, his eyes rolling back and his lids lowering. His hand slid down to hang at an uncomfortable angle, and Sarah moved forward to set it back on the bed.

  When she looked up once more, a single shaft of light broke through the grime of the window to cut across the floor exactly where Mr. Thayne had stood.

  But he was gone. Disappeared. His passage silent as the mist.

  5

  Bergen, Norway, 1349

  * * *

  Kjell watched the stranger fall to ash, watched his clothes crumple empty to the ground, and he understood nothing. None of this was real. Everything—the stranger, his mother’s death, the pain in his wrist—was but a fever dream, a delirium. That was the only explanation. He tried to move, to rise, but he was weak and weighted by despair.

  The pain in his gut bloomed, a dark flower, and spread like a poison to his limbs, his head. He writhed and cried out for hours upon hours.

  It was the smell that woke him, the smell of death, like nothing he had ever experienced. The smell, the sounds, the feeling of his clothing on his body, all familiar yet not. His wrist no longer pained him. He examined it to find no wound.

  He must have slept and in that sleep, he must have dreamed the stranger, his mother’s death, even the sunrise.

  The day had passed. It was night now, and the room was cold. The fire had long since gone out. But the cold was merely a fact, not a discomfort. His teeth did not chatter; his limbs did not tremble. He raised his hand and stared at his fingers, feeling as if he had never seen them before. The small hairs on his forearm were a wonder, the shape of his nails inexplicably fascinating, the sinew and muscle beneath his skin a symphony of movement. It took some time for him to remember to think of anything else.

  He rolled to his side and pushed up to a sitting position. His family was all around him, but they were gone. Dead. His father, his sisters, his brother, his—

  His mother lay where the stranger had left her, her throat torn open.

  No dream. It was real. The stranger had been real.

  Kjell’s heart broke, shattered, and he yelled and railed even as he knew it wouldn’t bring her back.

  He knew not how long he remained in that room. He brushed his sisters’ hair. He hugged his brother’s lifeless body in his arms. He wept tears of blood. The sun rose again and he hissed at the agony it caused, though little enough filtered through the animal skins that covered the windows. He crawled to his father’s bed and yanked off the blanket and spent the day hiding beneath it while the sun found small ways to poke through and burn him.

  It had burned the stranger to ash.

  He would be wary of the sun.

  Then it was night once more, cool soothing night and he was hungry, a strange hunger that could not be satisfied by food. In fact, the pickled fish and cheese and bread he tried to consume made him sick. And still, the hunger persisted, gnawing at him. It was not merely a growl or a twist in his belly. The hunger consumed him, lacing every breath, every movement of his limbs. He felt hollow, anxious, his skin too tight, his bones aching and empty.

  He set fire to his childhood home, burning the bodies of his family, his heart heavy. The smell of smoke, the heat of the flames, they were as they had always been and yet they were new and foreign. Everything was different. Everything was familiar but not, as if he had never before smelled fire, never before watched tongues of fire dance and writhe. The fire burned down to ash and as he sensed the coming dawn clawing at his skin, he wrapped himself in furs and tunneled under the ash to wait out the sun.

  He walked that night. In the morning, he felt dawn’s approach, felt it on his skin and in his soul, an itch that grew into a burning sting that grew into a blazing pain. And that with only the first hint dusting the horizon. That day he hid in a farmhouse with the bodies of the dead. It was everywhere, the plague. It killed all those it touched.

  He found food and, ravenous, he again stuffed salted fish into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. The taste was vile. The fish refused to remain in his belly. And he thought of the stranger hunched over his mother’s throat, of the sounds of slurping and guzzling. And he knew.

  This all-consuming, mindless hunger would not be slaked by fish or meat or bread. He huddled in the house as the sunlight reached across the floor toward him, and he thought of walking to greet it as the stranger had.

  He thought it, but he did not do it.

  He walked on, hiding from the sun each day, knowing that he must find a way to feed, horrified by what he knew he must do in order to survive.

  On the fifth night, he could barely walk, so consuming was his hunger. It clawed at his insides and made his thoughts veer from reason. He was near mindless, dragging one foot before the next, searching, searching. And then a scent carried on the wind, the scent of ambrosia, so rich and delicious he almost wept. He followed the smell, dizzy with hunger until he came upon a man huddled beneath layers of warm fur, a small fire burning before him.

  The man glanced up as Kjell stepped from the trees toward the flames. He looked weary and spent, and there was blood on his tem
ple and on his cheek. Kjell stared at the blood, lured in a way he had never been before, not by food or drink or even a woman. This was something else entirely.

  “Come no closer,” the man said. “I am sick. It is plague.” He turned his head and coughed until blood stained the ground. Kjell trembled where he stood, fighting a vicious battle within himself. “I will likely be dead by morning,” the man continued. “Stay back unless you wish the same for yourself.”

  Kjell swallowed. He would kill this man in a moment. He would take his blood and his life. He should at least know his first victim’s name. Beastly hunger roaring inside him, and he forced himself to fight against it, to ask, “What is your name?”

  The man frowned and said, “Thayne. Killian Thayne.”

  And then Kjell was upon him, tearing open his throat with his teeth, drinking his fill, taking the life of Killian Thayne, hating himself for it even as he licked at every last drop, the taste more wondrous than anything he had ever known, and he acknowledged that he would do it again and again, that he would feed, that he would live.

  He was not the boy he had been. He was reborn that night as the life of his prey slipped away.

  Days later, when he reached the harbor, he boarded a ship to England under the name of the first man whose life he had stolen. He was Kjell no longer; he was Killian Thayne.

  6

  Sarah rolled to her side in her tiny bed, neither asleep nor awake, but somewhere in between. The room was cold. She lay beneath her sheets, two thin blankets, and her cloak, which she had spread over top for extra warmth. Her lids fluttered open. She had dreamed of sunshine and a picnic with her father, but she saw only darkness now.

  Restless, she rolled again, tired, so tired. A hand, warm and gentle, settled on her brow and stroked her hair back from her face.

  “Sleep,” a man’s voice said. “Sleep now, Sarah. Dream sweet dreams.”

  A man’s voice, here in her room. A man’s hand on her brow. That couldn’t be right. She knew that voice. It was…

  Sleep reached for her and pulled her deep.

  * * *

  Early the following morning, Sarah made her way along the corridor of King’s College, shadows and moonlight creeping across the floor in an alternating pattern of light and dark stripes. Her steps quick and sure, she went directly to the surgical ward, anxious to check on Mr. Scully. He had clung to life throughout the previous day, crying out, moaning, growing increasingly ill. He had been feverish and lost in a world of his own making. Each time Sarah had looked in on him he had not recognized her, mistaking her for his dead wife.

  Now, she wondered if he had lived through the night.

  She paused in the doorway of the ward, her gaze sliding to Mr. Scully’s bed. There came a rushing sound, like wings beating, or a cloak flapping in the wind. She took a single step forward, then froze and made a startled gasp.

  Outlined on the far wall was a looming shadow in the shape of a man, his height and breadth exaggerated and magnified.

  A shadow with no source.

  She was the only upright person in the ward. Everyone else lay supine on their beds. There was no man to cast such a shadow. Her blood chilled and her gaze skittered about the room to make certain she was not mistaken.

  When she looked once more at the wall, the shadow was gone, disappeared.

  But the fine hairs that rose at her nape and the clammy fingers oozing across her skin made her certain that she had not imagined it, and that whoever—whatever—had cast the dark silhouette yet hovered, unseen, in the gloom.

  Pressing her palm flat against her breastbone, she tried to will both her racing pulse and her galloping imagination under control. Either there was someone here or there wasn’t, and she meant to determine which it was. Squaring her shoulders, she went and lifted the mop from the bucket that stood in the corner. The handle would do as a weapon if needs must. Then she walked the perimeter of the room and found no one there.

  Still, she could not discount what she had seen. Someone had been in the ward and gone to great lengths to remain anonymous.

  After returning the mop to its place, she went to Mr. Scully’s bed.

  “Mr. Scully,” she whispered. “Mr. Scully, how do you this morn?”

  He lay quiet and still.

  But there was something about the way he was arranged in repose...something both macabre and familiar. His head lolled to one side, his arms hanging over the edges of the bed.

  Breathing too fast, she took a step closer.

  A patient called out to her, but she did not so much as turn her head, for her entire focus was on the sight of Mr. Scully’s form, a lump beneath stained and frayed sheets. Not moving. Not breathing.

  The smell hit her, a heavy slap of urine and excrement.

  Dead. He was dead. Released from his pain.

  His eyes were closed. Sarah reached down and lifted his arm. His wrist was torn open, a jagged, gaping wound, the edges of skin and muscle shredded to reveal the whitish tendons of the long flexor muscles that stretched to his fingers.

  There was no blood.

  Despite the torn edges of the hole at his wrist and the depth of the wound, there was not a single crimson drop upon the sheet or the floor beneath.

  For a moment, she could not breathe, could not think, and then she forced herself to lower his arm to the bed, to sharpen her attention, to determine exactly what it was that whispered to her to look closer.

  Slowly, she walked all the way around the bed, aware that the patients on the ward were stirring, asking for water, for food, for a moment of comfort. Soon, someone else would hear the commotion, and they would come, they would see...

  What? They would see what?

  The body of a man who had been destined to die?

  Yes. But the manner of said death was both bizarre and disturbing.

  The fourth such death here at King’s College.

  She shivered.

  “Miss Lowell? Is aught amiss?”

  She heard the voice as though it came to her through a long, narrow tunnel.

  Turning, she faced him, Killian Thayne, tall and broad and unsmiling. He stood close enough to touch, dressed all in black, like a shadow, his eyes hidden behind the dark glass of his spectacles.

  “He is dead,” she said, her tongue like leather in her mouth. “Mr. Scully is dead.”

  “An expected outcome.” He paused “Yet you are distressed by his passing.”

  “By the mode of his passing,” she said in a rush, then wondered that she could be so foolish.

  Someone, a man, had been here earlier. She had seen his shadow. A large shadow cast by a tall man.

  And here was Killian Thayne standing before her, broad and tall. Had he sat by Mr. Scully’s bed this morn just as he had sat by another patient’s bedside on a morning weeks past, another patient who had died with the same strange and inexplicable wounds?

  “Let me see.” Mr. Thayne stepped around her and then around the bed to the far side. He stared at Mr. Scully’s sprawled form for a long moment.

  Wrapping her arms around her waist, Sarah watched him. His expression was unperturbed, his posture relaxed, but something felt off. Then she realized his lips had drawn taut. That was the only sign of his displeasure.

  He turned to face her once more and after a long moment said, “You are pale. Have you eaten today?”

  “I—” She hadn’t. Usually, she bought a bowl of salop from a street vendor near the lodging house, but this morning she had taken a different route to King’s College, one that did not carry her past the old woman and her still. She had hoped that by varying her route she might evade the one who stalked her. A foolish hope. He had been behind her, clinging to the darkness, his footsteps keeping time with her own.

  Mr. Thayne made a sound of frustration. “Have you brought food with you? Or do you intend to work the day through with nothing in your belly?”

  It would be neither the first time nor the last. But that was none of his affair.
She lifted her chin. “A man is dead.”

  Silence hung between them. “Fetch a stretcher,” Mr. Thayne instructed, his voice soft. “I shall wrap him in a sheet.”

  “I can summon one of the other nurses to help me.” She wondered why he offered to do this chore himself. Surgeons were not responsible for wrapping the dead.

  Only for killing them.

  She shuddered at the thought. What was it about Mr. Thayne that made her mind travel such a path? She knew that the physicians and surgeons at King’s College did the best they could. That more than half the surgical patients died was a fact indisputably assigned to every hospital in the city.

  But as she watched Mr. Thayne where he stood looming over Mr. Scully’s corpse, she wondered how it was that he had been present at two such similar deaths. No...not two. Four. He had been nearby when each of the four patients had been found with their wrists torn open, and the bloody pool that ought to have accompanied such injury inexplicably absent.

  He looked at her in the dim light, his eyes hidden behind his spectacles. She had the fanciful thought that he could see as deep as her soul, while she could see only the mask he chose to don.

  Who—what—did he hide behind that mask?

  Sarah took a small step back. She stopped herself from taking another, disturbed by her own wariness.

  What was she thinking? Mr. Thayne was a healer. He spent an inordinate amount of time at the hospital. More than any of the other surgeons. He was dedicated to his patients. She had witnessed his care and kindness in the months she had worked these wards. Was she now to imagine that he had killed four people by tearing open their wrists? To what purpose? What end?

  Confusion buffeted her, and she was appalled by her own thoughts, disdainful of them. She could not think why she allowed her mind to travel such a path.