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.