“Yes, Professor,” O’Rourke said.
“Like to learn that skill, O’Malley?”
“You bet.”
“Good lad, you never know if you’ll get through all four years and it’s good to have a trade—a lucrative trade—to fall back on . . . ”
“Did Perry make you learn how to articulate a skeleton?” Cruncher said in a low voice as we started to pry open the first lid.
“No. What about you?”
“No, but I watched—from a distance—but very closely, so I know how it’s done. I guess he figures ‘O’Malley’ doesn’t have much chance making it through the program.” He dropped a coffin nail in the pocket of his leather apron.
“Or if he does get a degree, Perry thinks he’s only going to treat shanty Irish, anyhow,” I said.
“God save the Queen,” Cruncher said, winking. “Dyson is strictly English. The Van in my name is from my mother’s family.” Cruncher tilted the flask and took a long swallow; then he passed the brandy across the coffin to me. I had a drink and handed it back.
“Ready?”
He nodded and we lifted the lid away,
“Aaugh!” I stepped back, pressing my sleeve against my nose and mouth. The stench rising out of the casket was unbelievable.
“Not quite frozen yet,” Cruncher said.
I felt myself beginning to retch.
“Here, sit down a minute.”
I sat on the cold floor and lowered my chin between my knees.
“Put some of this under your nose.”
He handed me a small round tin.
“It’s camphor ointment with a little peppermint and lavender.” He pulled aside his makeshift mask and I saw it gleaming above his upper lip. “Keeps the reek safely at bay.”
“She has the pox,” I said.
“No question there; her dancing days are done.”
I laughed weakly.
“And for godssake, take this handkerchief and tie it on.”
Maybe he saw me blush, or maybe it was because I didn’t immediately put my hand out for it when he took it from his pocket. “Go on, use it. I don’t give a good goddamn if you don’t have a handkerchief, Sykes. You’re smart. I like intelligent people.”
I smeared on a thick dollop of the waxy cream.
He has magic pockets,
I thought irrationally.
What’s next? A white rabbit, a flock of parrots?
“That’s right, cover your mustache hole,” he said.
I took the handkerchief—heavy linen—and monogrammed JVD, and began to fold it.
“Thanks, Jerry.”
“Don’t let the monogram show, a gentleman never does.” Above the makeshift mask, his eyes were merry.
“I know,” I said, tying it on, then standing up again and looking down at the woman’s hideously scarred face. “Terrible. Even her eyelids.”
“Maybe her eyes, too. She might have died blind.” He leaned over and lifted the scabrous flap of flesh and I saw that the sclera of her right eye had gone red from hemorrhage. He whispered, “Let’s take her, Sykes . . . think of what we could learn dissecting her.”
I realized that avarice I’d seen in his eyes earlier was for knowledge, even forbidden knowledge. But it didn’t stop me from interjecting, “Are you mad?”
He held up his gloved hands and waggled his fingers. “Nothing to worry about, Sykes. Seriously.”
I put my face up to his until we met like a bridge over the body and were nearly nose-to-nose. “The scabs . . . she’ll contaminate all the other bodies . . . ”
“Chuck her to one side at the bottom of the wagon, once we’re in the lab we can spray ’er and any of the others in proximity with phenol—no one’s going to get sick.”
“The professor—”
“It’s dark, he’s old and tired, he won’t see a thing. And a little judiciously dispensed cash will keep O’Rourke and Winterbourne shut up if they do notice her; and we make sure we’re the ones to haul our specimen out of the cart.”
“But in the lab—the others are bound to notice tomorrow when it’s daylight . . . ”
“We’ll start tonight, we’ll hide her till we’re done. Sykes, this could be the making of our careers.”
He didn’t say,
Especially yours.
We both knew that medical school scholarship boys were lucky to eke out a living—and they had to compete with midwives and barber-surgeons and even dentists. “What about afterward, Van Dyson?”
I saw the corners of his eyes crinkle and tilt upward and knew he’d smiled behind his mask. “That’s pie, Sykes, pure pie. We cut her up, flense and boil her to get rid of the grease; then we can articulate the skeleton.”
“And?”
“Keep it for a souvenir in your office or sell it. But I’m betting that when we’re done dissecting, neither of us will have to concern ourselves with anything more than where we’re going to display our Copley Medals. Just think. We’ll be in the company of Franklin and Gauss and Ohm.”
We had to shift a few bodies, but we wedged the pox victim on the bottom and against the slats that made up the wagon’s side boards. I started to push a corpse on top of her but Van Dyson caught my arm. “One more, Sykes,” he pleaded. “A male. It will make our research more complete. And after tonight, neither one of us will have to play at being resurrection men ever again.”
I nodded.
He was whistling as we walked back into the crypt for the last time. Cruncher really was an apt nickname, I thought—he wanted knowledge and, like his fictional counterpart, he was going to renounce grave robbing.
I heard the tower clock strike 2:00 a.m. We’d unloaded most of the corpses and dragged them to the lab. There was an oversized dumb waiter to hoist them to the second floor, but it took two men to pull its ropes—especially if there were two bodies on its platform.
“I must be getting old, lads. Can you handle the rest of these?”
“Sure, Professor.”
“No problem.”
“Certainly.”
“Absolutely. Good night, Dr. Perry,” I said.
“All right, I’ll take the landau and one of the horses, and my man can stay behind till you’re done, then drive the wagon back.”
“We can handle it, sir, no need for your man to hang about. Winterbourne can drive the wagon back.”
“Thanks, Van Dyson. Thank you all. It’s been a magnificent catch: An even dozen new specimens.”
“G’night, sir.”
Winterbourne had hooded the lantern again, and in the semi-dark, Jerry and I loaded the pox victims onto the dumb waiter.
“You go upstairs; shout down when the bodies are level with the floor, and I’ll tie off the ropes down here and I’ll send O’Rourke up.” His hands were clumsy with the thick gloves; he fumbled under his apron, then handed me a five-dollar gold piece. “But don’t let him hang around. Give him this. I’ll come up and we’ll move the bodies into the lab ourselves. All right?”
We shook hands briefly, then he pulled out the silver flask for the last time. “To Van Dyson and Sykes,” he said. “To our success.”
The anatomy lab was on situated on the second floor to take advantage of the sun that poured in through its skylight. Adjacent and behind a heavy, metal-clad door, was a kind of cold storage unit (also completely lined with metal) stacked with huge blocks of ice procured from the river, where we’d trundled most of the bodies we collected. But Winterbourne and O’Rourke had laid out three or four on vacant tables in the dissection room.
“Even a top-notch school like Yale has a dearth of specimens,” I said when we wrestled the male smallpox victim onto the last dissecting table.
“Well, these two won’t be occupying valuable space for long,” Jerry said. “Get some phenol, alcohol, whatever you can find.” He’d pulled down all the dark green shades and lit the room like Christmas—candles and lamps, even a crackling fire.
I went to the glassed cabinets. My hand was on the knob and I turned and said, “Let’s just spray them down and cover them up, I’m whipped.”
“Not on your life.” He was rifling a drawer in the dissection table he normally used and pulled out a syringe and a vial. “Seven-percent solution, cocaine. Nobody will be here before noon, they’ll all be in the lecture hall.”
I swallowed uneasily.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. How do you think I have the best grades in my class?”
Nightmares come to life. They really do. No one’s going to believe this—believe
anything
in these pages, but I’m going to leave them in my room after I flee. For all I know, they’ll be thrown away, but at least I’ll have written down what happened. Was it something in the disease itself that initiated the transition? I keep thinking about what Van Dyson said about the segregated pox cemeteries when I’d been about to punch him in Dr. Perry’s landau:
All the headstones face east.
And these victims were from the eastern wall of the crypt. It wasn’t
folie a deux,
it wasn’t the cocaine.
It wasn’t.
We’d sprayed the bodies; perhaps unwittingly we tracked or transferred scabs, carried them on our trouser or shirt cuffs from one corpse to the next. I was chattering away a mile a minute, my mind seemed filled with an exultance that bordered on ecstasy: there was nothing Van Dyson or I couldn’t do. He smiled. “Really clears the brain, doesn’t it? Let’s inject one more hypo each, then get started.”
We undressed the body. He lowered the lamp over the male. “Excellent. He’s thawing. That will make things easier for us.” He handed me the scalpel. “You may have the honor of the first cut, Dr. Sykes.”
“I’ll start with the classic Y, so we can look at how the organs might have been affected.”
He nodded. “I’ve got a stack of slides ready next to the microscope.” He stood opposite me, leaned in.
I pushed down, concentrating on making a straight line, keeping the depth even, and drew the knife upwards toward the sternum.
The man suddenly gave out a groan and his body convulsed.
I stepped back, scalpel in hand.
The corpse lurched upright and before I could react, its hands were around Van Dyson’s throat and its mouth . . . dear God, its mouth . . . was buried in the flesh of Van Dyson’s cheek. Van Dyson screamed. The thing broke his neck as easily as you’d snap a wishbone. His head hung at peculiar cant, his tongue rolled out between his slack lips and his eyes dulled. The corpse gnawed mouth, nose, the tender skin beneath the chin, grunting. Blood poured down its throat and chest.
I shrieked.
It raised its eyes to look at me and what I saw in them was malice beyond any evil I could ever have imagined. Then it grinned.
Behind me, the female was stirring.
Half-flensed bodies began to tremble on their tables beneath the sheets.
I lunged at the male creature with my scalpel upraised and plunged it into his ear.
The blade snapped off and he fell in a heap onto the wooden boards.
Be quick now, Sykes, aim true,
I told myself.
There are knives by the drawer-full here.
I stabbed eyes, ears, heads. I dismembered as many of the bodies as I could, boiled the parts in a huge black kettle I hung inside the fireplace. I could scarcely keep myself from vomiting a hundred times. It wasn’t doctoring, it was butchery.
Then I heard a rattle from behind the metal-clad door. As their bodies thawed—just enough—the time of the others we’d collected had come.
It was already near daylight.
I looked around helplessly at the carnage of the dissection room, then toward the knocking from behind the heavy metal door.
I’d never get all of them rendered quickly enough.
Besides, I mourned inwardly, it was Van Dyson who knew how to articulate them, how to give a corpse a purpose even when its flesh was gone. They’d be harmless when the meat of their brains was gone, I thought; and fire would have to see to the rest.
I raked the logs from the fire, turned over the kerosene lamps.
I heard the wild scream of the rising flames mingling with the guttural cries of the resurrected ones from behind the metal-clad door, and I fled.
Auden Strothers crept stealthily into the darkened anatomy lab.
Not a soul in sight—just whatever’s left of their wrecked bodies.
There was no time to worry about what might have happened to Sheri Trent, he reminded himself. Their cadaver—C 390160—lay under its blue sheet, its punctured eye hanging slightly askew on its cheekbone.
Impossible to think they ever nicknamed the foul thing Molly.
The autopsy students were always roving from table to table, watching a group prepare a slice of pancreas for histology, observing one of the professors work on a delicate area like the tongue and larynx . . . and people got their hands in—even if the cadaver technically belonged to another team.
He carefully unzipped the body bag embracing Team 22’s cadaver—the one that Sheri Trent had spattered with her own blood after she’d been bitten. Trent must’ve gotten her shit together when she saw the thing twitch—it too, had a deflated eye.
But, there were all those daily casual exchanges from table to table . . . and he counted two more blue sheets tagging corpses in the room . . .
and
the common graves where, Strothers had no doubt, the “disease” spread quietly underground and from place to place to place.
He snorted three lines of meth and joked inwardly that dismembering the bodies he was
sure
were infected, was essentially hackwork.
In his mind’s eye he saw the dead woman sit up and lunge, yellowed teeth bared. He saw the bloody pocket of the wound in Sheri’s arm. He cut and flensed, retching over his shoulder. Strothers picked up a surgical power saw, intent on wresting the femur from the pelvis. “For Christ’s sake,” he said aloud. He was trained to work carefully, what he was about to do was a waste. Besides, he hated the whine of the saw. If he proceeded cautiously—with precision—the bones could be articulated, he reminded himself, and used in schools and labs and hospitals.
There was a kitchen off the lounge where he could boil up the remains. Hell, if it came to it, he could cart them home in plastic garbage bags and fire up his own stove.
It was going very well, he was whistling when the lab door suddenly burst open.
He started; sure for a brief second that a mindless, shambling corpse that had once been Sheri Trent had come to gnaw his flesh.
“Security!” A female officer with blond hair advanced on him.