The Resurrectionist Read Free Page A

already being paid court by Charles de Mandeville.
    No doubt there are those with whom it rankles to be thus insulted, yet I do not think it is this alone which makes the students uneasy of him. For though as a surgeon and anatomist he has few peers, Mr Poll’s true achievements are greater, and deeper. From morning until long after dark he works, his restless energy filling the house, his curiosity often seeming more like a hunger, a monstrous appetite which will not be sated, probing always deeper, seeking to understand not just the structures of the body but the very essence of life itself.
    In this cause he has dissected all manner of creatures – crows and horses, fish and apes, insects, snakes, even a hippopotamus once, late of a menagerie in Chelsea – seeking to divine that which binds their being to the cage of their flesh. I have seen experiments too, things which amaze and horrify: a human tooth pulled still living from a harlot’s mouth, which took root and grew in a cockerel’s comb. The corpse of a newt given brief and slippery life by the application of electricity. A false womb, sewn from the bladder of a horse in which the blood-slathered foetus of a lamb swam briefly, struggling as if it were drowning in the air, before it grew still and died. In our work here, too, we seek out the monstrous and misshapen, those freaks in whom the script of Nature does not read true, for in the twisted mirror of their imperfections we might, he thinks, find the image of our own perfection.
    Nor is it just the dead who must bend to our will. I have seen Mr Tyne catch cats in a wicker trap of his own making, and more than once bring men and women here, bought for a florin in the ginshops of St Giles so they might sample some medicine or other and their reactions be measured and recorded. And a week after I came here I lured a dog to the house with a piece of meat so Mr Poll and Charles might open its chest, feel its living heart jump like a fish against our inquiring hands.
    As the lamps outside are lit the last of the students move away along the street, no doubt to some tavern, in which they will drink and laugh, and take their ease. Returning to the table I look down upon the opened corpse. It is a messy thing, to unstitch the dead, and it is my duty to ensure no trace is left in this room. Beside the basin which contains theheart, bisected to reveal its fat-clogged interior, the notebook Mr Poll used in his demonstration still sits where it was left. For all their theatricality his words have unsettled me, I think: it is a fearsome thing, this atheism of his; to put aside all belief which cannot be measured, to leave behind the strictures of what the world calls morality. Taking up the magnet I weigh it in my hand. Overhead the lamps hiss quietly, a steady sound, almost like rain. On the page the filings still mark out the ghost of the magnet’s presence; reaching down, I brush my hand across the page. The filings rustle, a sound like dead leaves, the lines broken where it has passed, the elegant whorls erased. Without the magnet the filings do not move to repair the pattern, instead they lie upon the page inert, unresponsive. They are such thin things, these lives of ours; cheap got, cheap lost, mere flickers against the ever dark, brief shadows on a wall. This life no more substantial than breath, a light which fills the chambers of our bodies, and is gone.

I T WAS LATE that first night before I slept, summer heat giving way first to thunder, then to rain. High in my room I felt the night move by, my body restless in the dark. Outside the clocks chimed twelve, then one.
    Then all at once I was awake again. Overhead a cobweb turned, slipping in and out of existence as it moved against a draught; on the roof the rain still moved.
    I had been dreaming, though I did not know what of.
    As first I did not move, uncertain what had woken me. And then there came a knock, a second one I knew at once, louder and more