part0037

Edmund Carnaby sat in the front of the empty lecture hall, silent as a church mouse, while Professor Darius drew on the blackboard–a diagram of the skull, each of the separate plates labeled in his unmistakable scrawl. Edmund glanced at the examination table. A body waited under a sheet.

“So I hear you’ll be leaving us at end of term, Master Carnaby,” the skeletal teacher said.

“Yes, sir,” Edmund replied, staring at his hands. Last night, he had bitten his nails to the quick. The nightmare had been bad; an army of half-dissected cadavers chased him down Piccadilly Circus.

“I must admit my disappointment,” Professor Darius said, still chalking. “You are one of the hardest-working students I’ve seen in years. Maybe not the most academic, but your drive is remarkable. It would have carried you far in medicine.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I took the liberty of looking through your records. Your father is a coal miner, your mother died in childbirth. You were raised in Whitechapel, where–unlike other youths who became exemplary criminals before their teens–you were an outstanding student with perfect attendance. At seventeen, you are the youngest man ever be admitted to Guy’s Hospital. Tell me, what could be so important that you are willing to toss all that away?”

“Not my choice, sir. My father’s wiped out his savings…. He gambles, and he doesn’t have another lifetime to save money for my schooling.”

“Ah.” Darius finally put his chalk down. He looked at Edmund, his eyes softer than usual. “I apologize. I didn’t understand your situation. Come, look at something with me.”

Edmund joined the professor by the covered corpse. The air smelled of formaldehyde.

Darius grasped the sheet and whipped it away.

An ape stared up at Edmund. Half of its face had been removed, revealing yellowed teeth and a blackened tongue. The fur was orange and ragged. The chest had been marked with X’s and dotted lines, awaiting the next lecture. The circulatory system , Edmund remembered.

“It cost our hospital a thousand pounds to ship this specimen from New Guinea,” Darius said. “Multiply that by the dozens of apes we go through during a semester. That amount would pay your tuition ten times over.”

“It would only cost two pounds for a Lancashire pig,” Edmund muttered.

“What was that?”

Edmund hesitated. “In biology, I’ve noted that the pig is our closest physiological relative, despite what the Darwinists say. Perhaps we should be dissecting pigs instead.”

Darius’ eyes twinkled as he replaced the sheet. “We should be dissecting human corpses,” he said. “But our government, in all their wisdom, has sanctified rotting bags of meat as unimportant to the advances of science. Tell me, have you heard of body snatching?”

“I haven’t, sir.”

“A phenomenon in the more lurid newspapers of late. It seems a squadron of enterprising young men have been digging up the recently deceased and selling them to the highest bidder. Collectors have been lining up, despite the illegality of the process. Such a hobby might prove profitable...to a young man down on his luck.”

Edmund said nothing.

“Also,” Darius continued, “if such a man were to bring bodies here, thereby helping to advance the medical field...perhaps he would find himself picking up some education free of charge.” He looked Edmund over. “Hmm. You have a strong build. Good muscle in the arms and chest. Have you considered physical labor after you leave our school, Master Carnaby?”

“Actually, I was thinking of grave digging, sir,” Edmund said.

Edmund Carnaby sat in a rocking chair outside a tavern called the Butchered Pig when Collins, Professor Darius’ newest assistant, approached him. Five years in the streets had hardened Edmund to a statue in a long black coat and tall hat. His eyes burned with fierce intelligence above a ragged pale face.

“Hello, sir,” Collins said, then sniffed at the air.

Edmund held a bottle of ale in one gloved hand and gestured at the street with the other. “I imagine this is what some of my clients wake up to–a world of blood and shit. What’s the old man got for me, sweetheart?”

Collins cleared his throat and drew himself up to his full five-foot height. “Professor Darius has requested…the…personage of an older male, between seventy and eighty years of age. He specified that the teeth should be as intact as possible, and of course, the fresher the specimen–”

“The higher my payment,” Edmund said, swigging from his bottle.

“I’ll make the appropriate inquiries.” All traces of the Cockney accent had vanished, and Edmund now sounded like the fearfully intelligent young man who’d left Guy’s Hospital five years prior. “I shall procure a specimen within seventy-two hours. And do tell Darius that I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation on the transfusion of bone marrow. It comes to me every time I dig up a new set of bones.”

Collins face screwed up, his eyebrows knitting together. “Professor Darius insists that I refer to you as The Resurrectionist…. Would that–”

Edmund burst into laughter, almost spilling his drink. “That’s rich. Yeah, sure…call me that. The Resurrectionist it is.”

Collins backed away slowly. He nodded, then turned and ran.

Edmund had sources in the Metropolitan Police, and a young sprat named Wheeler had told him about one Mr. Harrison Blake, found dead in his apartment in Shoreditch the night before, seventy-one years old, killed by a heart attack.

Edmund often hired independent muscle to do the digging, but he didn’t anticipate acquiring Blake’s corpse would be a problem. As midnight rolled around, Edmund was hard at work in Bunhill Fields, his lantern resting on his pick as he moved soft earth. Fog laced over the ground. The gravestones loomed as he dug deeper, an army of unblinking stone judges catching him in the act.

After an hour of non-stop digging, the satisfying clunk of shovel striking wood echoed from below his feet.

Edmund brushed the remaining soil away, his breath steaming the air, body lathered in sweat. The coffin had a brass nameplate with the letters HCB imprinted on an intricate font. Beneath the initials: SOME BOXES REMAIN UNOPENED.

The message may have once startled Edmund, but he had grown immune to such penny-dreadful philosophies. He traded the shovel for the pick, and minutes later he’d hacked open the coffin lid.

Harrison Blake’s face resembled a shrunken head Edmund had once seen, with a lipless mouth and leathery skin. The old man had been buried in a ratty dressing gown, and the mortician hadn’t been particular about preservation; pancaked makeup had been smeared around the old man’s countenance, calling attention to liver spots, sunken cheeks, and grey complexion.

His hands clasped an object.

Edmund reached down and tugged a box from his grip, letting Blake’s rigid hands thump to his hollow chest.

It was heavier than it looked. A different character had been embossed on each side of the hinged lid, resembling the kanji handwriting used by the Chinamen Edmund bought opium from. The lettering was bright red, like arterial blood.

Edmund tried the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. He turned the box over. A piece of parchment had been pasted to the bottom. I BELONG TO YOU .

Edmund grunted and hoisted a suitcase onto the operating table. He raised the lid. Harrison Blake had been bent to fit inside, his heels touching the back of his head.

Darius pried open Blake’s mouth. “Hmm. A nonsmoker. His teeth are in good enough order. I’ll throw in ten pounds atop your usual fee.”

Normally they traded bits of academic rumor and obscure medical facts while Darius retrieved his checkbook. This time, Edmund had raised a different subject. “Collins told me that I’m The Resurrectionist now.”

“Seemed fitting, what with all you do.” Darius fumbled with the papers on his desk.

A pang of frustration ran through Edmund. “Tell me, sir, what do you make of this?” Edmund presented the box.

Darius examined it, moving it back and forth under the light. “The construction is fairly new,” he said. “Not much damage to the exterior. It has been handled with extreme care. The figures on the sides have several characteristics common with the Chinese language but also contain something of the Cyrillic. Linguistics was never my strong suit. Where did you get it?”

“Buried with the specimen. He held it in his hands.”

“Well, the elderly do have their eccentricities, which, unfortunately, I now know from experience. Would you like to hold on to this?” Darius offered the box back.

“The madman image is a smokescreen,” Edmund said. “I don’t keep trophies, but if you manage to get the lid unstuck, I’ll take half of whatever you find inside.”

“Hell,” Darius replied. “After my dental presentation tomorrow, you can have half of Blake’s teeth. They’d make a wonderful necklace.”

Professor Darius removed Blake’s lips, slicing through them with a scalpel before dropping them into a jar of formaldehyde. He was so engrossed in the process that he had forgotten the box on the table beside him.

It clicked open, the lid rising on silent hinges.

Darius squinted and leaned toward the box.

The box is huge, so big it fills the world, but somehow he is even bigger. It opens like a music box.

God’s holy body is stretched out on a slab of black stone. His innards have been removed, labeled, jarred. His left eye is missing, and in the empty socket, Edmund can see God’s brain.

After reading the headlines in the morning newspaper, Edmund rushed to Guy’s Hospital. Collins sat in Darius’ office, cleaning out the desk, packing books and papers into a wooden crate. His eyes were bleary and red.

“What happened?” Edmund asked, storming into the room.

Collins jumped, one hand going to his heart. “What are you doing here? If the Dean sees you–”

“I think our arrangement won’t affect the professor’s career anymore. What happened to Darius?”

Collins collapsed in a chair and started sobbing. “He worked late last night. No one came in or out. The watchman has already been questioned by the police, so...what happened…the professor must have done to himself.”

Edmund resisted the urge to seize Collins by the throat and throttle the life out of him. Instead, he kneeled, took the little fellow’s face in his hands, and murmured, “Show me.”

Collins explained that the lecture hall had not yet been photographed, nor had the medical examiner come down to look over the body. Two beefy patrolmen stood on either side of the entryway.

Edmund carefully came out of the trapdoor behind the blackboard, sure to not disturb the guards, when the scent hit him–the unique, iron-shaving smell of a body freshly cut open.

Professor Darius lay on the autopsy table, spread-eagled. His face had been carefully peeled away in strips, revealing a manic smile, the raw red tissue striating his skull. His exposed eyeballs stared up at nothing, a fierce, uncompromising blue. A large incision had opened him from sternum to groin, and the spleen, a lung, and most of the small intestine had been piled at his side. Blood splattered the floor around the table in a crazed Rorschach pattern.

On the chalkboard behind the body, the words were written: ‘IT BELONGS TO YOU NOW ’.

Darius held a scalpel in one palsied hand. In the other, sat the box.

Edmund Carnaby hadn’t quite drunk himself to death, as far as the chambermaid could tell, but he was getting there.

He’d been renting the room a long time before she had started working at the Butchered Pig, and it showed. The place was a sty and stank of opium and puke. She kicked old bottles aside and gathered the sheets for laundry.

He might have been handsome once , she mused as she laid fresh sheets on the mattress, but that time had ended . Now Edmund had the haunted, harried look of a sleepwalker trapped in a nightmare. He’d inherited some money from an old professor, back from his schooling days, and promptly set about drinking all of it up.

The man himself was out, probably digging up a corpse, and the chambermaid found herself wondering if old Edmund had maybe squirreled some cash away. No sense to the idea; the man rarely bathed and downed gin like it was going to be outlawed. Still, she found herself looking through dresser drawers a scant minute later.

In the bottom, buried under a month’s worth of tattered, filthy clothes, she found a box. The symbols carved into the wood reminded her of notes she’d sometimes carried back and forth between the Chinese sailors for a few extra shillings.

She had just decided to take the box to market when the lid clicked open.

Edmund trudged up the stairs, disappointed that he hadn’t found a drink that would kill him.

He’d hated every bloody damn second of life since the night he’d dug up the box. By all rights, he should’ve starved to death in a gutter. He could’ve shot himself months ago…or turned to the noose or a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones. But he hadn’t, and hated himself.

All because of the box. He had never found a way to open it. The damn thing was just wood. It should’ve splintered the night he’d smashed it with a crowbar or when he fired a bullet at it one fine drunken evening. Nothing. Not even a chip.

If only Darius had told him how to open it, then perhaps Edmund might not have thought about the box morning, day, and night.

He climbed the last steps, turned the corner…and froze.

His room door was ajar.

He burst through. The chambermaid stood with her back to him, humming. A distant part of his brain recognized Tchaikovsky. Where the hell would she have heard that?

The maid held one hand up to her face. The other gripped the opened box.

Edmund forced himself to remain still and said, “I don’t mind you being in my room, honestly, but I need you to hand me that box, right...now.”

She continued humming as she turned. Edmund gasped. The chambermaid had stitched her eyelids shut. The needle still hung from her left eyelid on a length of black thread, swinging back and forth.

“I don’t need to see anymore,” she said, smiling. “The inside, I saw...I saw....”

“What?” Edmund growled, taking one step forward. “What did you see? What was inside?”

She suddenly leaped backward, crashing through the window. Edmund grabbed for her and tore a piece of her white apron, which fluttered from his hand like a flag of surrender.

The chambermaid lay still in the street, neck crooked, blood in her hair, and when Edmund reached the ground, a crowd had gathered. No one seemed to notice him bend over the body and grab the box before vanishing into the crowd.

His knowledge of anatomy was unparalleled. His sharp tongue was the subject of myth. His endless fascination with the limits of the human bodies was spoke of in awed whispers.

Still, other rumors followed him through the halls–stories of a past in debauchery and grave robbing; lurid experiments involving physics; dissections late at night in the vivisectorium.

No one bothered talking to the school’s custodial staff, a crew of eighteen wizened matrons who scrubbed blood off the floor on their hands and knees. Edmund paid them to assist with his experiments, nothing too bizarre or even interesting. He had them play with a little wooden box and patiently waited for something to happen.

He’s not paying enough. Not for this bollocks. Not by a long shot , the footman thought as he ran through Leicester Square. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked, and the footman almost yelped in response. His footsteps echoed off the cobblestones. Filthy business. First the other two whores, and now two in one night….

The footman found Edmund lying on the ground, sobbing, only recognizable by his hair: stark white, thinning far too early for a man of his years, and skeletal claws beating at the ground.

“I almost saw it,” Edmund said, choking on his words.

“We got to get moving, guv’nor,” the footman said, looking around. “They’ll ‘ave ‘eard the noise, and Old Bill might be on ‘is way already. We ‘ave to go!”

The footman yanked Edmund to his feet, then noticed a prostitute, her legs clad in torn stockings, one shoe pulled partway off. Blood filled the gaps between the cobblestones.

“I gave it to her,” Edmund gibbered.

The footman raised his hands to his mouth. “You don’t pay me ‘nough to get caught up in this, Carnaby,” he told Edmund, directing him to his carriage.

Edmund continued raving. “She had the box…and then she tried to steal it. I heard it click open, do you understand? The box opened! ”

The room surrounding him was paneled with bamboo and cherry wood, the air sweetened with opium smoke. Businessmen lay on silk couches, smoking the pipe and chasing the dragon, each attended by lovely young Chinese girls, hair blacker than sin, some clothed in iridescent kimonos, some naked.

The sorceress sat atop a throne, mahogany skinned and tattooed with hundreds of kanji symbols. Her hair was tied back with a leather thong, and her nails were filed to killing points.

Long strips of flesh had been torn from Edmund’s back, revealing the red muscle beneath. His fingernails were gone. His chest bore several brands, still smelling of cooked pork. Before him, marked with his own bloody fingerprints, lay the box.

Edmund licked his swollen lips and spoke in Mandarin, the language alien and uncomfortable on his tongue. “Please. I’ve heard tales about you, my lady. In the slums and docks they whisper of your abilities. To find lost things. To reveal the invisible…to open that which was not meant to open.”

The sorceress seemed to consider him with her dark eyes, her lips twisting in cruel amusement. She whispered something, and Edmund thought the voice came from within his own head. “You have come a long way, Westerner. So few survive my followers. Your resolve is strong, though your body is failing.”

“I’ve done…terrible things over the years. I’ve studied the human anatomy in all its glory, mastering the effects of pain and ecstasy. I have learned of quantum physics, and cryptozoology, and arts so black they tarnished my soul. I’ve climbed Nepali mountains and spoken words that can stop a man’s heart. But…I don’t know what’s inside.”

Edmund caressed the box lovingly.

“It’s always been there,” he continued, “hiding its secret from me. This box has caused the deaths of sixty-six men and women over the course of my life. I’m old. I’m tired. But still I must know.”

The sorceress stood. A hush fell over the opium den as she circled the box, her tattooed legs flexing. She bent and touched it with one long finger. Her tongue flicked out, caressing the bloody wood. She took Edmund’s face in her hands and kissed him slowly.

“I cannot tell you,” she said. “That is, I cannot tell you…what. However, I can tell you when.”

The room was spacious, every shelf and table occupied by medicine bottles, suspensions, and pill jars. The air smelled of alcohol, human sickness, and spoiled meat.

He lay on his side, his back a mass of raw bedsores. It didn’t matter how often the nurses turned him. His hair was gone, as well as his teeth. The rot he’d contracted in Shanghai had run its course, and the doctors had amputated both of his feet and his left arm to the elbow. Three decades earlier, they’d told him he wasn’t expected to live.

Edmund smiled, his skin stretched taut and yellowed. He felt the arrhythmia in his chest–the icy pain of a heart finally giving up.

He stretched, reaching for it, always on the nightstand, never out of his sight. His love. His only reason for being.

The Resurrectionist’s long nails touched the box…and the lid clicked open. •

Jack Maddox is the author of The Dog: Necrophagus , and his stories have appeared in Splatterlands , Dark Moon Digest , and The Last Diner . He likes clockwork, insects, and sculpting evil heads from clay.