Author Nick Moulton
Length 2,000 words
Genre/Theme Victorian, alternative universe horror
Comment This story was written for the BBC Radio 7 series Blood Lines and was broadcast on the 14th March 2007
___________________________________
I arrived at Dr O'Carroll's Asylum for the Deceased in a black carriage. As the fair-haired young doctor helped me down, I screamed in his face that I was still alive and wrenched free of him. Two mortuary attendants held me down and injected me with formaldehyde to quiet me, as my husband – dressed in impeccable mourning – produced my death certificate and committal papers.
They fastened me to a trolley, and wheeled me through the building. By twisting my head (and would I have been able to do that if I were dead?), I was able to see endless green walls, swinging double doors, and the beshrouded forms of the unfortunates who shared my plight.
We stopped. I heard the rattle of keys and the groan of hinges. Then the trolley rolled into a dimly lit chamber, and I my straps were unfastened.
I raised myself to a sitting position. The mortuary attendants blocked the door: a fat, balding tough, and a vile little man with red hair. Despite their white coats, I had no doubt that but for the Asylum, the pair would be scraping a living from the rougher sorts of agricultural labour.
The fat oaf waved a lordly hand. “'Ere we are, miss. 'Ome sweet 'ome.”
The room was a windowless vault with whitewashed walls, furnished with a lead coffin. The only light filtered through a tiny grille in the top of the door.
I protested the lack of light; and the fat man told me that it was against Dr O'Carroll's rules – sunlight and fresh air would make a woman in my condition too 'excitable'. Nor was I allowed to read, write or have any form of amusement.
“What am I to do ?” I asked. “Stare at the bare walls all day?”
“That's what most of 'em do,” the thin man said.
The door banged shut, leaving me in twilight.
I was still weak from my illness, and my movements were slow and clumsy: I shuffled aeound the vault like an old woman, running my hands over the lime-washed walls.
Apart from the coffin, which rested on a stone shelf opposite the door, there were no furnishings whatsoever– not even the sparse comforts of prison. I had no Bible, no plate or pitcher, no chamber pot.
I pounded on the iron door and screamed until I fell to my knees with exhaustion.
At last, I stumbled back to the bleak casket in which I was to pass my nights. It was a coffin in the modern fashion: lead-lined, with a halo of brass rods around the head, and a mass of wiring leading to the wall.
I could not bear to look at it, so I closed it up, sat on the lid, and wept dry tears.
For a night and half a day, I raged and wept. It is a fearful thing to die: more fearful still is to be treated as one of the dead.
At last the bolts slid aside. The light poured in, and I stumbled out. Tthe young doctor at whom I had screamed on my arrival took my arm – he was a tolerably handsome man, if a little short.
He introduced himself as Dr Morgan, and invited me to walk with him in the grounds.
“Is this a privilege you usually offer corpses, or am I receiving a special favour?” I enquired, and watched him blush to the roots of his blond hair.
"I have a scientific interest in your case," he said. "However....It would be better if you were not to mention it to other patients. Dr O'Carroll does not approve of favouritism."
“Am I such a remarkable cadavar to excite your professional curiosity so? Or is there, perhaps, some uncertainty about my diagnosis?”
He stammered that from the moment I stepped down from the carriage, I had exhibited many fascinating symptoms. Then he plunged into medical jargon so dense and impenetrable that one would need a scalpel to cut through it. I let him rattle on, noticing the sidelong glances he gave me. Men used to look at me in that way before I was married.
If I were truly dead, he surely would never look at me so.
At last I began to see a way out of this hell.
I was awakened before dawn by the rattle of keys in the door. Before I could utter a word, the orderlies had me by the elbows, and I was pinioned, face down, on a trolley. I struggled hard, as they wheeled me to a place that reeked of ether and formaldehyde.
"Where am I? Please."
"Keep still, miss. Dr O'Carroll has to operate." The redhead fool sounded almost kind.
I could see gloved hands, a green coated figure leaning over me. The surgeon's soft Irish accent carried clearly through his mask.
"You are in the pathology laboratory, Mrs Heatherington. It is necessary for us to fit you with a galvanic battery. Please remain still."
"I am not dead!"
I remember nothing more of the procedure beyond my overpowering horror.
There was a soft knock on the door of my vault. I rolled over, and attempted to cover my eyes with my arm.
"Go away!"
The door opened. A hand touched my back.
"Mrs Heatherington?"
I glared at Dr Morgan and pulled my shroud around my shoulders to hide the battery.
"I don't want anyone to see me like this."
"I won't look." He turned his back on me. "May I stay and talk to you?"
"You shouldn't have allowed them to do it."
"If Dr O'Carroll believes a procedure to be necessary, I am in no position to oppose him. He is England's finest resurrectionist."
"I am not dead! My husband has falselyimprisoned me here."
"Mrs Heatherington, your notes are quite clear. You died of peretonitis a fortnight ago and were conveyed to Chelsea Emergency Mortuary. Your husband begged Dr O'Carroll to attempt resurrection."
"Then where is he now?"
"He cannot see you. A strict condition of our being allowed to run this establishment is that those in our care have no further contact with the living. There are... moral dangers."
"But I can still feel my heart beating."
He pressed his warm fingers to my temple and held them there for nearly a minute. It felt comforting. Then he shook his head.
"You have no pulse, Mrs Heatherington. Amputees feel itches in their missing limbs; I believe you are experiencing something similar."
The certainty of his diagnosis sliced away my fear: Sarah Heatherington, respectable wife of Charles Heatherington, was dead. I brushed my fingers over my dead hair, my dead face, my dead body. I wanted to know this strange, new, dead me.
I stood up, deliberately letting my shroud fall open at the neck. "Doctor – tell me – do I not look alive to you?"
He stepped back, and blushed. Again.
"Doctor O'Carroll will be pleased to hear that you are recovering so well," he said.
If I could not have life, I would seize every compensation offered me.
His name was Richard; he was unmarried; and he lived in the village. He had been a Houseman at St Thomas's Hospital, until he chanced to attend a lecture by the Imperial Resurrectionist Foundation.
"Dr O'Carroll told us of miracles. Then he brought out little Molly Fisher, six months dead of scarlet fever. She danced on the stage and wrote her name on a slate. I was in the presence of a new god. What could I do but serve him?
"More than two hundred have been brought back since Molly. At present, we can help only a select few. But twentieth century man will be born to immortality."
As he spoke, I examined the back of my hand. My nails had finally stopped growing, and the embalming fluid in my veins stood out pale blue against the skin. I wondered if Dr Morgan had noticed that I was starting to look like a corpse. Would our conversations continue once I became one of the slack-jawed creatures that shambled about the gardens during my periods of 'exercise'?
I forced the thought out of my mind.
"And what benefit will it be for any of us, Dr Morgan, if we are unable to love? Why should I carry on mouldering in an aslyum if I am to be kept from passion or feeling by fear of 'moral danger' – I would sooner go direct to the grave!"
He gasped at the coarseness of my language.
"Yes – the grave! I am not afraid to use the word – indeed I would welcome it."
He stared at me, and then his eyes dropped to the floor.
"What benefit indeed, if we are unable to love?" he said. "But what kind of love survives death?
At Christmas, he gave me a tiny sprig of holly and mistletoe. Now we talked of life: his childhood in Yorkshire and his burning ambition to study medicine; my brief marriage to Charles, and the summer we shared in Whitby before I fell ill.
I spent an hour describing Pharoah, the horse I had ridden as a child. He told me about blissful days salmon fishing in Scotland.
He would snatch five minutes from the end of his appointments with the famous Molly Fisher, who stared endlessly at the door of the next vault, and delay his rigor mortis clinic so that he could steal extra time with me.
At first he recorded fictitious symptoms in my notes as an excuse for his visits. But before long, the list of complaints was as thick as a copy of the Times, and he feared that the great and terrible Dr O'Carroll would want to examine me himself.
"He must not suspect these visits," Richard said. "A scandal would ruin him – and destroy the resurrectionist cause."
When spring arrived, he left me flowers gathered from the grounds – foxgloves, lillies and dog daisies. He arranged for a lamp to be left in my vault – although, strangely, I rarely remembered to light it.
I did not expect to fall in love with him. But I found myself pressing my ear to the spyhole for his footsteps. I counted imaginary heartbeats between visits. I could not bear to be without him
It was a spring morning when he stumbled into my vault, clutching a bloodstained hankerchief to his face. I sprang to him.
"Dr Morgan – are you hurt?"
He shook his head. "Just a scratch. Molly Fisher scratched Cottrill and I had to help restrain her."
"You poor man. Let me see."
The Fisher child had clawed three deep gouges in his cheek. I wiped a little blood from the wound.
"You must get that attended to," I said.
"I needed to see you first, Sarah."
He seized my hand and fell on one knee.
"I have struggled against it. I have fought to hide it. But I cannot help myself. Sarah – I love and honour you above every woman. You are a wonder of resurection – a vision in shroud and formaldehyde."
"Richard! Please – if we are discovered..."
"I don't care. I must be with you."
The door swung open. Flanked by the two mortuary attendants, Dr O'Carroll glared at us.
"I was told that you were injured, Morgan. I see that I have arrived in time to prevent a far greater mishap. Come with us!"
The redheaded mortician stepped forward and seized Richard's arm. He did not struggle. The door slammed, and again I was entombed in darkness and silence.
I do not know how many days I passed sitting on my coffin, staring at the wall. I desired only anhilation. Without Richard, death was once again a torment.
So far did I sink that I ignored the familiar footsteps in the corridor outside, and the rattle of keys in the door.
"Sarah!" His voice was thin as poison gas. But as my heart leapt, I assured myself that it was yet another illusion sent to torment those amputated from life.
"I am back."
I felt his firm grip on my hands. I raised my eyes to see Richard before me – in the shroud of an inmate.
His face was pale; a scar ran across his forehead; and his left eye rolled wildly in its socket. Wires from the galvanic battery on his back were plugged into his spine, brain and jaw.
I held him – my dear doctor - as he twitched in my arms.
He smiled, and his jaw dropped open, revealing tombstone rows of blackened teeth.
"I have come back to you my dear. To stay."
Length 2,000 words
Genre/Theme Victorian, alternative universe horror
Comment This story was written for the BBC Radio 7 series Blood Lines and was broadcast on the 14th March 2007
___________________________________
I arrived at Dr O'Carroll's Asylum for the Deceased in a black carriage. As the fair-haired young doctor helped me down, I screamed in his face that I was still alive and wrenched free of him. Two mortuary attendants held me down and injected me with formaldehyde to quiet me, as my husband – dressed in impeccable mourning – produced my death certificate and committal papers.
They fastened me to a trolley, and wheeled me through the building. By twisting my head (and would I have been able to do that if I were dead?), I was able to see endless green walls, swinging double doors, and the beshrouded forms of the unfortunates who shared my plight.
We stopped. I heard the rattle of keys and the groan of hinges. Then the trolley rolled into a dimly lit chamber, and I my straps were unfastened.
I raised myself to a sitting position. The mortuary attendants blocked the door: a fat, balding tough, and a vile little man with red hair. Despite their white coats, I had no doubt that but for the Asylum, the pair would be scraping a living from the rougher sorts of agricultural labour.
The fat oaf waved a lordly hand. “'Ere we are, miss. 'Ome sweet 'ome.”
The room was a windowless vault with whitewashed walls, furnished with a lead coffin. The only light filtered through a tiny grille in the top of the door.
I protested the lack of light; and the fat man told me that it was against Dr O'Carroll's rules – sunlight and fresh air would make a woman in my condition too 'excitable'. Nor was I allowed to read, write or have any form of amusement.
“What am I to do ?” I asked. “Stare at the bare walls all day?”
“That's what most of 'em do,” the thin man said.
The door banged shut, leaving me in twilight.
I was still weak from my illness, and my movements were slow and clumsy: I shuffled aeound the vault like an old woman, running my hands over the lime-washed walls.
Apart from the coffin, which rested on a stone shelf opposite the door, there were no furnishings whatsoever– not even the sparse comforts of prison. I had no Bible, no plate or pitcher, no chamber pot.
I pounded on the iron door and screamed until I fell to my knees with exhaustion.
At last, I stumbled back to the bleak casket in which I was to pass my nights. It was a coffin in the modern fashion: lead-lined, with a halo of brass rods around the head, and a mass of wiring leading to the wall.
I could not bear to look at it, so I closed it up, sat on the lid, and wept dry tears.
For a night and half a day, I raged and wept. It is a fearful thing to die: more fearful still is to be treated as one of the dead.
At last the bolts slid aside. The light poured in, and I stumbled out. Tthe young doctor at whom I had screamed on my arrival took my arm – he was a tolerably handsome man, if a little short.
He introduced himself as Dr Morgan, and invited me to walk with him in the grounds.
“Is this a privilege you usually offer corpses, or am I receiving a special favour?” I enquired, and watched him blush to the roots of his blond hair.
"I have a scientific interest in your case," he said. "However....It would be better if you were not to mention it to other patients. Dr O'Carroll does not approve of favouritism."
“Am I such a remarkable cadavar to excite your professional curiosity so? Or is there, perhaps, some uncertainty about my diagnosis?”
He stammered that from the moment I stepped down from the carriage, I had exhibited many fascinating symptoms. Then he plunged into medical jargon so dense and impenetrable that one would need a scalpel to cut through it. I let him rattle on, noticing the sidelong glances he gave me. Men used to look at me in that way before I was married.
If I were truly dead, he surely would never look at me so.
At last I began to see a way out of this hell.
I was awakened before dawn by the rattle of keys in the door. Before I could utter a word, the orderlies had me by the elbows, and I was pinioned, face down, on a trolley. I struggled hard, as they wheeled me to a place that reeked of ether and formaldehyde.
"Where am I? Please."
"Keep still, miss. Dr O'Carroll has to operate." The redhead fool sounded almost kind.
I could see gloved hands, a green coated figure leaning over me. The surgeon's soft Irish accent carried clearly through his mask.
"You are in the pathology laboratory, Mrs Heatherington. It is necessary for us to fit you with a galvanic battery. Please remain still."
"I am not dead!"
I remember nothing more of the procedure beyond my overpowering horror.
There was a soft knock on the door of my vault. I rolled over, and attempted to cover my eyes with my arm.
"Go away!"
The door opened. A hand touched my back.
"Mrs Heatherington?"
I glared at Dr Morgan and pulled my shroud around my shoulders to hide the battery.
"I don't want anyone to see me like this."
"I won't look." He turned his back on me. "May I stay and talk to you?"
"You shouldn't have allowed them to do it."
"If Dr O'Carroll believes a procedure to be necessary, I am in no position to oppose him. He is England's finest resurrectionist."
"I am not dead! My husband has falselyimprisoned me here."
"Mrs Heatherington, your notes are quite clear. You died of peretonitis a fortnight ago and were conveyed to Chelsea Emergency Mortuary. Your husband begged Dr O'Carroll to attempt resurrection."
"Then where is he now?"
"He cannot see you. A strict condition of our being allowed to run this establishment is that those in our care have no further contact with the living. There are... moral dangers."
"But I can still feel my heart beating."
He pressed his warm fingers to my temple and held them there for nearly a minute. It felt comforting. Then he shook his head.
"You have no pulse, Mrs Heatherington. Amputees feel itches in their missing limbs; I believe you are experiencing something similar."
The certainty of his diagnosis sliced away my fear: Sarah Heatherington, respectable wife of Charles Heatherington, was dead. I brushed my fingers over my dead hair, my dead face, my dead body. I wanted to know this strange, new, dead me.
I stood up, deliberately letting my shroud fall open at the neck. "Doctor – tell me – do I not look alive to you?"
He stepped back, and blushed. Again.
"Doctor O'Carroll will be pleased to hear that you are recovering so well," he said.
If I could not have life, I would seize every compensation offered me.
His name was Richard; he was unmarried; and he lived in the village. He had been a Houseman at St Thomas's Hospital, until he chanced to attend a lecture by the Imperial Resurrectionist Foundation.
"Dr O'Carroll told us of miracles. Then he brought out little Molly Fisher, six months dead of scarlet fever. She danced on the stage and wrote her name on a slate. I was in the presence of a new god. What could I do but serve him?
"More than two hundred have been brought back since Molly. At present, we can help only a select few. But twentieth century man will be born to immortality."
As he spoke, I examined the back of my hand. My nails had finally stopped growing, and the embalming fluid in my veins stood out pale blue against the skin. I wondered if Dr Morgan had noticed that I was starting to look like a corpse. Would our conversations continue once I became one of the slack-jawed creatures that shambled about the gardens during my periods of 'exercise'?
I forced the thought out of my mind.
"And what benefit will it be for any of us, Dr Morgan, if we are unable to love? Why should I carry on mouldering in an aslyum if I am to be kept from passion or feeling by fear of 'moral danger' – I would sooner go direct to the grave!"
He gasped at the coarseness of my language.
"Yes – the grave! I am not afraid to use the word – indeed I would welcome it."
He stared at me, and then his eyes dropped to the floor.
"What benefit indeed, if we are unable to love?" he said. "But what kind of love survives death?
At Christmas, he gave me a tiny sprig of holly and mistletoe. Now we talked of life: his childhood in Yorkshire and his burning ambition to study medicine; my brief marriage to Charles, and the summer we shared in Whitby before I fell ill.
I spent an hour describing Pharoah, the horse I had ridden as a child. He told me about blissful days salmon fishing in Scotland.
He would snatch five minutes from the end of his appointments with the famous Molly Fisher, who stared endlessly at the door of the next vault, and delay his rigor mortis clinic so that he could steal extra time with me.
At first he recorded fictitious symptoms in my notes as an excuse for his visits. But before long, the list of complaints was as thick as a copy of the Times, and he feared that the great and terrible Dr O'Carroll would want to examine me himself.
"He must not suspect these visits," Richard said. "A scandal would ruin him – and destroy the resurrectionist cause."
When spring arrived, he left me flowers gathered from the grounds – foxgloves, lillies and dog daisies. He arranged for a lamp to be left in my vault – although, strangely, I rarely remembered to light it.
I did not expect to fall in love with him. But I found myself pressing my ear to the spyhole for his footsteps. I counted imaginary heartbeats between visits. I could not bear to be without him
It was a spring morning when he stumbled into my vault, clutching a bloodstained hankerchief to his face. I sprang to him.
"Dr Morgan – are you hurt?"
He shook his head. "Just a scratch. Molly Fisher scratched Cottrill and I had to help restrain her."
"You poor man. Let me see."
The Fisher child had clawed three deep gouges in his cheek. I wiped a little blood from the wound.
"You must get that attended to," I said.
"I needed to see you first, Sarah."
He seized my hand and fell on one knee.
"I have struggled against it. I have fought to hide it. But I cannot help myself. Sarah – I love and honour you above every woman. You are a wonder of resurection – a vision in shroud and formaldehyde."
"Richard! Please – if we are discovered..."
"I don't care. I must be with you."
The door swung open. Flanked by the two mortuary attendants, Dr O'Carroll glared at us.
"I was told that you were injured, Morgan. I see that I have arrived in time to prevent a far greater mishap. Come with us!"
The redheaded mortician stepped forward and seized Richard's arm. He did not struggle. The door slammed, and again I was entombed in darkness and silence.
I do not know how many days I passed sitting on my coffin, staring at the wall. I desired only anhilation. Without Richard, death was once again a torment.
So far did I sink that I ignored the familiar footsteps in the corridor outside, and the rattle of keys in the door.
"Sarah!" His voice was thin as poison gas. But as my heart leapt, I assured myself that it was yet another illusion sent to torment those amputated from life.
"I am back."
I felt his firm grip on my hands. I raised my eyes to see Richard before me – in the shroud of an inmate.
His face was pale; a scar ran across his forehead; and his left eye rolled wildly in its socket. Wires from the galvanic battery on his back were plugged into his spine, brain and jaw.
I held him – my dear doctor - as he twitched in my arms.
He smiled, and his jaw dropped open, revealing tombstone rows of blackened teeth.
"I have come back to you my dear. To stay."
THE END
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