The rain fell on London in a greasy drizzle, washing the soot from the air only to smear it across the streets as black sludge. A fitting baptism, Alistair thought, for the work ahead. He tugged the collar of his worn coat higher; the wool was soaked through, heavy with the smell of damp earth and that other scent, something metallic, a stain he could never quite scrub from his hands.
The gate of Saint Bartholomew's cemetery groaned on hinges that screamed of neglect. He slipped inside, a shadow among the taller, grander shadows of mausoleums and weeping angels. His heart beat a frantic rhythm against his ribs, a drumbeat not of fear for the dead, but for the living. For the small room above the apothecary where his sister, Clara, was drowning on dry land, each cough a little weaker, a little more final.
The doctor's words, sterile and cold, echoed in his head. Consumption. There is nothing more to be done.
Alistair refused it. Science held an answer for everything. Sometimes that answer just had to be dug up from the dark to be brought into the light.
The fresh plot was easy to find, the soil still loose, smelling of raw, wet earth. His spade bit into the ground with a soft, yielding thud. This was the worst of it, the violation. He whispered an apology to the nameless soul below not for the theft, but for the haste, the lack of grace. A man of science, yes, but not a monster.
"For Clara," he muttered, the words a mantra against the chill seeping into his bones. "It is always for Clara."
An hour later, the deed was done. The canvas sack in his wheelbarrow held its grim, heavy prize. He navigated the labyrinthine alleys of the East End, moving from the world of the remembered to the forgotten. His laboratory lay in the basement of a derelict charnel house, behind a rusted iron door that looked like an entrance to hell itself.
Inside, the air was cold and still, thick with the cloying scents of formaldehyde, dried herbs, and the coppery tang of old blood. Shelves lined the walls, crowded with jars where things floated in cloudy suspension. Books on anatomy, alchemy, and forbidden philosophies were stacked haphazardly on every available surface. This was his sanctuary. His prison.
With a grunt, he heaved the body onto the stone slab table. The canvas fell away, revealing a young man, pale and still. Alistair's hands, usually so steady, betrayed a slight tremble as he lit the hurricane lamp. The yellow light swung, casting dancing shadows that made the specimens in their jars seem to stir.
He prepared his tools. The scalpel gleamed in the lamplight. He needed to understand the musculature of the thorax, to practice a procedure so risky it demanded absolute perfection. One slip, and his next harvest the one that truly mattered would end in failure.
He positioned the blade.
And then he felt it.
A faint warmth beneath his fingertips on the corpse's wrist.
He snatched his hand back, his heart seizing. A trick of the mind. Guilt making a phantom. He pressed his fingers to the neck, searching for the steady silence of death.
He found a pulse.
Thready. Weak. But there. Unmistakably there.
"No," he breathed, the word tearing from him as he stumbled back, crashing into a table. Glassware rattled a sharp, discordant alarm. "This can't be."
This was no corpse. This was a person. Buried alive.
His scientific mind, his anchor, was swept away by a raw tide of horror. He had been moments from… He looked at the scalpel in his hand and let it clatter to the floor as if it had burned him.
He rushed forward, his medical training surging to the fore, overriding the panic. He cleared the mouth of soil, checked the airways, began to chafe the cold limbs, rubbing life back into them. He was no resurrection man. Not now. Now, he was a doctor.
"Come on," he urged, his voice sandpaper-rough. "Come back."
Minutes stretched, thin and taut. Just as a crushing despair threatened to take him, the body on the table convulsed.
A raw, ragged gasp ripped through the charnel house's silence.
The figure jerked, chest rising in a sudden, desperate heave for air. Alistair stared, frozen, as the eyes flew open.
They were not the eyes of a man.
A startling shade of hazel, wide with a primal, terrified confusion, they belonged to a woman. The short hair and men's burial shroud had fooled him. She stared blindly at the low stone ceiling, then her gaze sharpened, locking onto him, a man looming over her with a lantern, in a room fashioned from nightmares.
A silent scream choked in her throat. She scrambled backward off the slab, falling hard onto the cold stone floor, her limbs tangling in the shroud. She stared at him, at the tools, at the macabre jars, her breath coming in short, terrified hitches. A ghost seeing a ghost, a soul ripped back from the brink into a chamber of horrors.
Alistair stood utterly helpless, his own breath trapped in his chest. He saw it all through her eyes. The blood on his hands, the steel instruments, the collected grotesqueries. He was not her savior. He was the monster in the dungeon.
She was alive. And she had seen everything.
The carefully constructed wall around his mission shattered. His secret was no longer his own. It was staring back at him from the cold floor with the eyes of a terrified woman who had escaped one tomb only to wake in another.