Page 14 of Her Creation

A frown pulled at her mouth as her hands slid over the length of his arm, slowly pressing in to feel the anatomy of his clearly muscular and severely damaged arm. It drooped in a way that tightened Victoria’s chest. The lace-covered tips of her fingers ghosted over the angry marks on his wrist and arm. Moving to his legs, she lifted the sheet and draped it over his intimate area. “Impressiones funium circum carpos et tarsos—rope marks around your wrists and ankles.” Her hand moved up his large ankle, up to his knee where she pushed firmly. “Luxatio cubiti et genuum.” She repeated this on the other leg. “Dislocation of your elbow and knee.” She paused to jot her findings down before continuing on the rest of him, inadvertently feeling herself weighed down more with every injury she found. She yawned as she replaced his arm and righted the sheet before pulling up a chair and writing her final bit of notes for the evening in the gap of the open table.

“Death from multiple traumas, fractures, contusions with superimposed burns. I believe it to be consistent with the execution wheel,” she mumbled as she wrote. She set the notebook down and leaned against the table to look into his cold, gray face, unable to look away. It was as if someone had torn her open and mirrored how she felt. “We’re quite similar in feeling, I believe, but for you there is a new hope. All of mine has been extinguished. What little pinprick of it remains rests solely in you.”

Her heart ached to put the cadaver away and go to her mother’s grave. She needed to tell her mother that Papa would not stay with her and that one day they would be united again. She needed to feel the grit of the headstone’s worn stone on her forehead as she told her mother about her newest developments, the change to the cranial machine’s capabilities. But the winter weather and the wolves that roamed through the forest kept her from going at the current hour. It was all the same; she felt weak-tongued and would likely ramble about her father’s state and what he had done, something she prayed her mother hadn’t seen as Victoria’s hand touched the cheek he had slapped. “He’s never—” The words froze as her eyes caught sight of the movement in the cadaver’s throat.

She leaped up from the chair and gaped at the body. His Adam’s apple moved again, as if he were trying to swallow. Victoria’s hands slapped over her mouth, and adrenaline surged.

It was impossible.

But…perhaps it wasn’t. What if God had taken pity on her? If her mother could not be brought back, she little needed to attempt resurrection. Her chest swelled. Surely this was why she had felt such an attraction to this man—he was a gift from God.

She flew forward and clasped her hand around his throat, widening her eyes when she felt warmth and movement beneath her hand.

“It cannot be.” But despite her disbelief, she felt the movement and heat. Her mind spun. She needed to get her father, but there wasn’t time. He couldn’t breathe. Who knew how much longer he would be trying? “It’s all right—it’s all right, I can help you,” Victoria stammered as she grabbed a small blade off the wooden table nearby. With blade in hand, she pressed the sharp blade into his throat, sliding down, hoping to open the airway.

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.