EACH RUNG LASTED AN eternity. I lingered longer than I should have. I knew I had to see what was beyond the trapdoor, but part of me desperately hoped it would be locked.
I reached it and pushed tentatively.
It was not locked.
I shoved it open and rushed up the last few rungs, pulling myself into a space that was dim but still brighter than the windowless entry.
The sound of rain hitting an ever-deepening puddle competed with the wild pounding of my heart to make music of discord and chaos. In place of a symphony to accompany me, there was a stench.
A stench of things rotten.
A stench of things dead.
And above and around it all, burning fumes that made me cough and gag.
I pulled out a handkerchief and covered my nose and mouth, wishing I could cover my stinging eyes, as well. But I needed them.
The dripping noises were different up here, though. Now that I was in the room, they had a faint metallic quality, hitting something other than the warped and blackened wood floors. In the center of the room, illuminated by the cloud-choked day, a pool of water rippled and shifted, gathering in the center of a table before dripping off the sides to meet with the water on the floor. The table was situated directly beneath the open roof panels.
I stepped closer. Broken glass crunched beneath my boots. The table had held my attention, but now that I looked down, I saw that the entire room was littered with shattered glass containers. Someone had gone to a tremendous amount of trouble to break everything in here.
Most of the larger glass pieces were sticky and wet with whatever had been held inside. It smelled to me like some death-tainted form of vinegar. Chemicals that preserve yet corrupt in equal measure.
Some of the glass remains bore…other substances. Gelatinous mounds on the floor. Poor, sad pieces of—
I pulled my gaze away. Something about the nearest spill made my eyes refuse to focus on it. It had no recognizable form, and yet I knew—I knew—I did not want to look at it.
My boots crunched and scraped as shards of glass embedded in their soles. I crept toward the table. Whether because it was the center of the room or because it was the best-illuminated feature, I was drawn toward it, pulled on a current.
The table itself was metal, as large as a family dining table. Around it were various apparatuses I did not know the meaning or use of. They looked complicated, all gears and wires and delicate tubing. And every one, like the glass containers, had been smashed beyond repair.
A pole, also metal, wrapped in some sort of copper wiring, extended from the head of the table to the windows in the roof. But it, too, had been warped. It was bent, the wires dislodged and hanging from it like hair ripped from a doll’s head.
The water pooling on the table was thicker and darker along the edges, as if rust had been pushed outward. It smelled sharp and metallic, but with something organic beneath it all. Something like—
I pulled my finger back from where I was about to touch the near-black stains.
It smelled almost like blood. But whether the water dilution or the chemicals in the room had affected it, I did not know. Because I knew the scent of blood. And this was so close, and yet different in a way that repulsed me more than anything else here.
“What were you doing, Victor?” I whispered.
A clattering noise surprised me, and I whipped around. My bare hand brushed the side of the table, giving me another shock like the door handle had. I cried out, stepping away. My arm was numb. Though I could command it to move, I could not feel the movements.
Terrified, I searched for the source of the sound. Again! This time, of sharp things scratching at a surface. A flurry of movement, black darker than the shadowy corners of the room. I lifted my arms to defend myself from—
A bird. Some misshapen carrion thing, scratching and pecking at a massive trunk that took up nearly the length of the wall on the side closest to the riverfront. The bird must have gotten in through the roof opening.
Cross with it for scaring me—and with myself for being so easily frightened—I reached down for the nearest thing on the floor to throw.
My fingers closed around a long knife unlike any I had seen. It was shaped like a surgeon’s scalpel, though no surgeon would need a scalpel this large. Other points of metal among the glass on the floor winked invitations for exploration. A saw, too small for wood. Clamps. The wickedly sharp and absurdly long metal tips of needles, glass vials attached to them broken and jagged.
The bird cawed darkly, a sound like laughter.
What was in the trunk?
It was the fall before the first winter I would spend cocooned inside with the Frankensteins. The leaves were so scarlet that even the light had a crimson tinge. Birds circled overhead: those that were leaving and those that were hardy enough to survive the long dark of the mountain winter.
Victor and I were walking the paths we had made in the undergrowth when we heard a desperate thrashing.
We crept toward the noise, both of us silent without agreeing to be so. Victor and I often functioned that way—I could respond to his needs without being told. Some sense, some careful attunement, always guided me.
I gasped when we found the source of the commotion. A deer, far bigger than either of us, lay on its side. Its visible eye rolled wildly, chest heaving as it panted. One of its legs was twisted at an unnatural angle. The deer struggled once to rise. I held my breath, hoping, but it crashed back to the forest floor and lay still save its desperate breaths and an odd keening sound. Was it some instinctive, unconscious noise? Or was the deer actually crying?
“What could have happened?” I asked.
Victor shook his head. His hand, which had grasped mine, slowly released. I could not take my eyes away from the deer until Victor spoke. The trembling determination in his tone pulled all my attention.
“We cannot let this chance pass,” he said.
“What chance?” I saw only the wounded thing in front of us. “Do you want to help it?”
“There is no helping it. It will die.”
I did not want it to be true, but he was right. Even I knew that if prey animals could not run, they could not survive. And this deer could not so much as stand. It would slowly starve to death lying on the cold forest floor, covered by the falling leaves.
“What should we do?” I whispered. I looked around for a large rock. As much as I hated to even consider it, I knew that the kindest thing we could do was end its suffering. It never occurred to me to run to the house for help. The deer was ours, our responsibility.
“We should study it.” Victor leaned closer, laying his hand on the deer’s flank.
I did not want to do that again. Not ever. But I mournfully supposed that once the deer was dead, it would not much care what was done with its body. And as always, Victor’s happiness was my first priority.
I nodded, misery siphoning away the afternoon’s happiness like the winter cold slowly sucking the color from the trees. “I will find a rock we can use to kill it.”
Victor shook his head. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife. Where he had gotten it, I had no idea. We were not allowed knives, and yet Victor nearly always had one. “It will be better to study while it is still alive. How else can we learn anything?”
His hands shook as he lowered the knife; he looked sad, but more than that, he looked angry. He almost vibrated with intensity, and all my instincts were to soothe him. To distract him from this. But I did not know how to calm him, whether I should calm him at all.
Then the knife went in. It was as though that thing I saw sometimes beneath Victor’s surface, struggling to get out, had been released with the first cut. He sighed, and his hands steadied. He no longer looked afraid, or angry, or sad. He looked focused.
He did not stop. I did not stop him.
Red leaves. Red knife. Red hands.
But white dresses, always.
The deer stopped keening. It did not die as Victor tugged the knife through the skin over its stomach. I had imagined it parting like the crust of a loaf of bread, but it was tough, resistant. The sound of tearing made me sick. I turned away as Victor strained to make progress with blood coating his hands and making the knife slippery.
“It will be harder,” he said, breathing heavily with exertion, “to get through the ribs before the heart stops beating. Run to the house and get a bigger knife. Hurry!”
I ran. I did not beat the failure of the heart. Frustration and disappointment twisted Victor’s face as I held out the long, serrated knife the cook would be blamed for losing.
He accepted the knife and got to work on the now-still rib cage. I turned away again, keeping my eyes on the scarlet leaves trembling above us. A single leaf fell, and I marked its lazy path down until it landed in the darker crimson pooled at my feet.
I saw nothing. I heard everything. Knife ripping skin. Blade against bone. All the delicate viscera that support life spilling like slop onto the forest floor.
Victor learned about the paths blood takes in a living creature, and I learned the best ways for cleaning that blood from hands and clothes so that his parents would never know the course of our new studies.
When I crept into Victor’s room that night, I found him drawing the deer still alive, but flayed so that all the parts he had seen inside were showing. He shifted to let me into the bed. I could not get the deer’s noise out of my head. Victor actually fell asleep before I did for once, his face at peace.
That winter was long and cold. Banks of snow as high as the first-story windows sealed us in, away from the world. And while his parents did whatever it was they did when they were not with us—we were utterly uncurious about them—we played games only a child like Victor could design. He had been inspired by the deer. And so we played.
I would lie silent and still, like a corpse, as he studied me. His careful, delicate hands explored all the bones and tendons, the muscles and tracings of veins that make up a person. “But where is Elizabeth?” he would ask, his ear against my heart. “Which part makes you?”
I had no answer, and neither did he.
The metal scalpel in my hand was a sort of comfort. Though nothing in this room threatened me, I could not fight the instinct telling me I was in danger. Telling me to flee.
“Shoo!” I stomped toward the bird. It fixed one baleful yellow eye on me, clacking its murderously sharp beak.
“Get out!” I ran the rest of the way, startling it. In a flurry of feathers, it flew past me and into a black hole in the wall I had not noticed. I followed it, finding the beginning of the chute that ran from the building to the river. It was large enough that I could have comfortably crawled through. Doubtless it had been added to dispose of refuse. But it was so large! What had been the purpose of this building before Victor?
Chest heaving, I looked down at the trunk that had so fascinated and occupied the wretched bird. The trunk was made of wood, painted with thick black tar to seal it. An inelegant but effective form of waterproofing.
I tried to lift the lid, but it was locked. Crouching, I found a heavy padlock securing it. With trembling fingers, I pulled out the key I had found beneath Victor.
It fit.
I wished desperately it had not.
With a well-oiled click, the padlock sprang open. I unhooked it, opened the latch, and then heaved the long lid upward.
The force of the smell was a physical blow. I fell back onto the ground, cutting my hand on a shard of glass. The scalpel skidded away along the filthy floor. I turned my head and vomited, my stomach seizing my whole body in spasms to propel me from this.
Coughing, I found my handkerchief and held it to my face instead of binding my hand. I stood, my legs shaking, and looked down.
There were…parts.
Bits and pieces, like sewing materials discarded but saved for the day when perhaps they might be useful. They could not have been too old, because the decay was minimal. Bones and muscles, a femur so long I could not guess what animal it had come from. A hoof. A set of delicate bones like a puzzle waiting to be pieced together. Some of the parts had been roughly sewn together.
A sheet of parchment, tacked to the lid of the box, shifted in the breeze from the open roof. It bore lists: Types of bones, types of muscles, missing parts. The name of a butcher shop. A charnel house. A graveyard.
This was a supply box.
“Oh, Victor,” I sobbed. I yanked the list free and shoved it into my purse. Lowering my head, I saw in the far corner something square and inorganic wrapped in an oiled sheet. I reached in as carefully as I could, gagging again as my hand brushed something cold and soft. I pushed past it and grabbed the item I wanted. I pulled it out and slammed the lid of the trunk closed.
It was a book. For some reason, though, it frightened me more than anything else in the room. Moving away from the horrible supplies, I opened the well-worn leather covers of Victor’s journal.
His handwriting, tiny and cramped, as though he feared not having enough space to get his thoughts down, was as familiar to me as my own. There were dates, notes, anatomical drawings. At first they were of animals and humans. And then they were of something…not quite either. I skimmed the words through my tears, his handwriting growing more frantic with each passing page.
The final page was a drawing of a man. More than a man. The proportions were wrong, the scale monstrous. And beneath it, written with so much force it was carved into the paper, the words I WILL DEFEAT DEATH.
I closed the journal and dropped it on the floor. Numb, I went back to the trapdoor and climbed down, closing it over my head. One hand still had not recovered from the shock of touching the metal table, and the other was cut. I slipped, falling down the last few rungs. I stood just as an insistent fist pounded on the door.
I opened it. “Sorry!” I said breathlessly. Justine, Mary, and an older gentleman stood waiting. “This quarter frightens me. I did not want anyone else to get in.”
“Elizabeth!” Justine took in my bloodied hand and doubtless wild expression.
I forced a smile. “I slipped trying to tidy up. Come, we must get Victor away from here.”
I led them into the room, hoping they would not be curious. Fortunately, Victor’s state was so obviously dire that they did not bother exploring anywhere else. Though Mary peered around the room with narrowed eyes, she helped leverage Victor out of bed. “What is that smell?” she asked.
“We have to get him into the carriage. Hurry!” I rushed them through the entryway, praying they would not look up and want to check the room there. When they were all safely outside, I closed the door firmly.
“At least it is over now,” Justine said with a relieved sigh. I still had work to do, but I smiled in companionable relief as though I, too, were leaving that horrible place behind forever.
Justine took my elbow, wrapping my hand in her clean handkerchief. My dress was covered in dirt and grime. Bright spots of my own blood stood out as if it had been spilled on filthy snow.
“You were right to come,” Justine said. “He needed you.”
He always had. And he did now more than ever. I had to help Victor get well, and I had to protect him. I could not let anyone discover the truth:
Victor had gone mad.