THE NOISES STARTED SOMETIME in the night, during the hour when the moon was at its highest. Not screams, exactly. More like moans. Howls. Sounds I couldn’t put a name to. I lay in bed, wide awake, staring at the odd shapes the moonlight threw against the whitewashed walls. I couldn’t tell what type of creature he was working on in that blood-red, windowless laboratory. I’d heard the panther make all types of howls and cries on the ship, but nothing like what came from that building.
Whatever it was, it was large.
Tears pooled in the hollows of my eyes. I wiped them away angrily. All I could think was that I’d gotten what I wanted—answers. Why should I be surprised? Hadn’t I suspected the rumors were true, somewhere deep in the creases of my mind? And what about all the other strange things happening—the islander dying, Balthazar showing up at the picnic with rifles? Father had lied to me about everything.
The angrier I got, the more thorny memories began to surface, like drowned bodies rising to the water’s edge. I remembered his voice calling to Crusoe, Here, boy, there’s a good dog, and the laboratory door locking shut with a quick, dull click. I remember how the servants’ eyes were bloodshot and sunken on the mornings after he’d operated. The screaming kept them awake, too. But none of us ever spoke of it. Least of all Montgomery.
Thinking of Montgomery made my hands twist at the sheets. He’d spent almost half his life on the island. He must have known of my father’s guilt. Why hadn’t he told me? And then I remembered how he’d tried to talk me out of coming. He’d warned me without putting it into so many words. But I’d insisted. I’d said I’d have to sell myself on the streets if he didn’t take me with him.
But was this any better? This terrible, anguished truth?
A painful bellow tore through the night. I kicked the sheets off, sweat pouring down my neck. Was it the sheepdog? I didn’t know any creature that could make such an ungodly sound. As the screams dragged on, haunting my every breath, my mind started to wander to darker and darker places. Wondering what would cause an animal to scream like that. Imagining the beast spread out, shackled down, dotted lines traced on its skin in black ink. And why? What purpose did Father have for such wanton cruelty? He was beyond dissecting for knowledge’s sake. He already knew every corpuscle, every bend of nerve. No, he wasn’t studying. He had to be working on something new. Something different.
My mind searched for an answer among the moonlight splashes on the walls. Whatever experiment he was working on, it had begun in his laboratory on Belgrave Square when I was a child. Over the years he withdrew inside himself more, working later and later hours. Even when he was with us, his eyes would stray to the door, as if half his mind was always tethered to that laboratory. Whatever it was—his new discovery—it had consumed him enough to abandon everything else in his life. It was more important than his reputation, his wife, even his daughter.
It was this idea that drew me out of bed. After years of wondering what science he’d unlocked in that damp basement, a science that he loved even more than he loved me, I had a chance to see it. My feet swung into a pair of house shoes as though they had a mind of their own. The need to know pulled me like a puppet, commanding me to dress quickly, to open the door, to find out what my father was working on that had brought him to the edge of madness.
A single lantern hung in the courtyard, swinging softly in the breeze. It threw the light at odd angles, making shadows lengthen and then disappear. A faint glow came from beneath the laboratory door.
I waited until the lantern light dimmed, then darted around the portico, past the servants’ bunkhouse and the barn to the laboratory, where I pressed my back to the tin wall. The thrill of finally learning Father’s secrets took little bites out of me, making me feel savage. The screaming had stopped, but my head pounded, clouding my senses. A low, mournful sob began from within, then grew into an earsplitting wail. I dug my palms against my ears.
This was madness. This curiosity inside me was unnatural. It had pushed me further from my mother, further from reason and rules and logic. But there were times I still couldn’t resist it.
I rested my forehead against the wall and closed my eyes. It wasn’t just my curiosity, or my fascination with anatomy, or how I could unhesitatingly chop a rabbit’s head off with an ax when a roomful of boys couldn’t. Those things were all symptoms of the same sickness—a kind of madness inherited from my father. It was a dangerous pull in my gut drawing me toward the dark possibilities of science, toward the thin line between life and death, toward the animal impulses hidden behind a corset and a smile.
Turn back, I heard Mother whispering. It’s wrong, what he’s doing. But she was no longer here to scold me. I was free from her and society and the watching eyes of the church. I could do whatever I wanted. But what did I want? To follow that slithering curiosity to Father’s laboratory door, or to listen to Mother’s ghost and go back to bed where I could close my ears to the screaming?
One last wail came from the laboratory. Air slipped from my lungs. A tuft of snow-white fur blew slowly across the stone portico. I picked it up and rubbed it between my fingers. Next to me the dark entrance to the barn gaped like a chasm. I peered inside cautiously.
Out of the darkness came a white shape, hopping to the edge of the barn, just inches from my toes. One of the rabbits. Somehow, it had escaped its cage.
Father didn’t eat rabbits. They were intended, rather, for the sharpened blade of a scalpel. To pursue science. But the difference was that my father wasn’t accused of practicing science. He’d been accused of butchery. He’d already crossed that forbidden line long ago. And I couldn’t lie down on my feather mattress and just listen to it. To understand my own curiosity, I needed to understand his.
I returned to the laboratory. The tin door had the same latching doorknob as the rest of the buildings. I squeezed it slowly with bated breath. I felt the latch catch and release. It opened in my hand, silent as the night, but I dared not enter.
The sharp smells of rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde slipped from the cracked doorway. In an instant, I was a little girl again, sneaking into her father’s laboratory. The memory was so strong, I almost shut the door and ran back to my room.
But a whisper came from the dark.
I held my breath to keep the smells at bay. Peeking through the cracked door, my eyes adjusted slowly. At the end of the room, a shadowy figure stood over a wooden operating table surrounded by a lantern and candles on a high shelf. The candlelight reflected in dozens of dark glass jars lining the walls, like the glowing prayer candles in a dark cathedral. Only these jars didn’t hold votives, but things I could only imagine.
Specimens. Experiments. Nightmares.
And the figure at the front, the unholy priest, was my father. His back was to me, but I knew the tight set of his shoulders and shape of his head. Whatever was on the table was half covered by a sheet, and all I could make out was the shape of thin limbs, the scarlet spill of blood on the sheet, a pile of towels at Father’s feet, the silver gleam from the surgical instruments. The sound of fluid slowly dripping reminded me of the ticking clock in the dining room. Father said something in his low voice. I imagined more of his haunting commandments, some kind of terrible prayer, but it was only mental notes to himself. He lowered the blade to the table. The scalpel pressed against firm flesh, which gave, the muscle opening like butter.
The thing on the table jerked to life with a painful squeal. Its cry was a blade to my heart. Thick leather manacles bound its limbs to the corners, but it writhed wildly under the sheet. My sweaty palm slipped on the door latch. I wiped it on my skirt. As terrified as I was, my eyes were riveted to that table.
Father seemed unfazed by the thing’s torment. The manacles strained and rattled, but they held. Father kept cutting, a slice here, another there, as graceful as an orchestra conductor. He hummed a few notes of a melody. The Chopin piece, I realized with a sickening lurch. I caught only glimpses as his hands flew over the creature. A flap of skin, pale and still dripping with subcutaneous fat, pulled back on its shin. A white bit of bone flashing in the candlelight. Father covered it with a towel to stanch the blood, but the towel soaked quickly. He peeled it off carefully and dropped it into the growing pile at his feet. So much blood. It made me tipsy. For a moment my thoughts slipped out of my control, into a primal hunger. What was he doing? This wasn’t just vivisection. It was much more than that.
He was creating something.
He stepped away, clearing my line of vision. I got a look at the leg under the sheet, and my throat tightened. Instead of toes, there hung a stump wrapped in a bloody bandage. No, no, this is wrong. It was my own voice now, not Mother’s. It didn’t matter what he had discovered, what higher purpose he thought he was following. He’d crossed the line into a place you couldn’t come back from.
The thing’s skin looked pale, sickly. He must have shaved the creature, because its leg looked almost human except for the twisting hinge of the knee. I swallowed—I’d seen that same awkward twist before, in Balthazar and the other islanders’ lurching limbs.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. An inkling of what he was doing in that laboratory ruffled my thoughts. He was operating on the islanders … but why?
Father came back with a wooden clamp that he set over the ankle, holding it still. The toneless humming faded as he pressed his fingers delicately along either side of the knee. With a grunt, he threw his weight against the leg and cracked the knee socket, buckling it against the brace.
I cried out. I couldn’t help myself. But the creature’s wail matched my own and drowned my voice. Its cry rattled the glass cabinets. A candle fell from the shelf and crashed onto Father’s hand. He cursed and jerked his hand back, knocking the sheet off the creature.
I looked away, but it was too late—I’d already seen the animal body stretched out unnaturally, limbs splayed like a human’s. Impossible to tell what creature it was or had once been.
My stomach threatened to bring up supper. I blinked back angry, frightened tears. Frightened for the beast, and frightened for myself—for inheriting my father’s sick curiosity. I should have run back to my room and forgotten all of it. It wasn’t the blood or the flesh that made me sick, but what he was doing. Evil. He was what they said he was. A madman. A demon.
A monster.
Through the crack in the door came his voice.
“Blasted devil. Boy, come hold it down!”
He was speaking to someone. I pressed my eye against the door crack. The thing on the table had worked free of one manacle and was rattling the table in an effort to get loose. A second figure appeared from some dark corner, looking ghostly through the screen of my tears. As he approached the candlelight, I recognized the blond hair falling into his eyes, the handsome tanned face. He threw his weight on the thing on the table, pinning it down, and jabbed a needle into its arm. My heart shot to my throat.
Montgomery. He was more than just aware of Father’s experiments—he was assisting him. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Not Montgomery.
My knee slid and knocked into the tin laboratory door. It shook with a loud metallic tremble that made my breath catch. I dared a glance into the laboratory to see Father turn, peering keenly at the crack in the door.
“Who’s there?” he barked. And then, “Find out, Montgomery. Use the dogs if you must.”
I slammed the door shut. My limbs screamed to get away. Run.
But where to? The gate was locked. I was trapped.
I dashed into the warm darkness of the barn, hiding, fleeing, pacing. I glanced at the roof. It was thatch, so there was a chance I could climb through. The wilderness beyond was uncertain, but that was better than the certainty of what was happening in the laboratory. I grabbed a pitchfork and, balanced on top of a sawhorse, thrust it through the roof, dodging falling straw and sticks, until a shaft of moonlight poured through the hole. I hoisted myself up onto the wide rafter beams, kicking my feet, and pulled myself through the thatch into the warm night air.
It didn’t matter what was out there as long as it was away from the truth.
Heavy footsteps sounded in the courtyard. Montgomery. He’d soon find out I was gone and hunt me down with the bloodhounds. He’d drag me back to Father’s nightmare in minutes.
I climbed down into the barn again, kicked off the hutch latch, and pulled out two kicking rabbits. They squirmed in my hands. I climbed back onto the sawhorse and pushed them through the thatch hole, then went back for the rest before pulling myself after them. The rabbits wouldn’t stop the dogs, but they might slow them down.
I dropped to the ground. Pain shot through my shins. Then I was tearing blindly through the jungle.