The Resurrectionist

by A. Rae Dunlap

breath. I would recognise his face always, in any manifestation, in this life or any other. Always.

Besides, this was my world now: Nye, the school, the crew, and all that went along with it.

And there, in solemn, stoic beauty, lay the pristine corpse of Mary Paterson.

his pace making the reveal of his facial features all the more dramatic; for the man’s face was truly that of a monster—and I am not one to speak in hyperbole.

His left eye was missing, its absence poorly disguised by the presence of a ragged eye patch. His lips were pulled into a grisled, sneering scowl, and what little hair he had stood out from his head in sparse, unkempt tufts.

The scale of his loss was incalculable.

Malstrom never made a mess of his subjects, for he insisted it was an insult to their posthumous dignity.

No wonder his audiences spoke with such awe of his methods; this was theatre, plain and simple. Entertainment.

When juxtaposed so severely against Knox’s monstrous visage, the scene, in sum, was so utterly grotesque that I yearned to turn away.

Hamish set his jaw. “I don’t really see how that’s my problem.” “Because,” retorted Nye with a menacing grin, “you’re going to help us catch the bastards.”

“You know as well as I do that Mary didn’t die, she was murdered. And I intend to prove she wasn’t the only one. So, are you going to help me or not?”

“He destroyed the evidence.” Nye’s voice was low. “He knew.” “Knew what?” Hamish sounded unimpressed.

in this case, if all the specimens were truly the victims of Alcohol-Induced Asphyxiation, there’d be bile present in the airway. And”—I turned to peer more closely at the swirling blue contents of the vile—“in this case, it’s clearly not.”

results: None of the cadavers had asphyxiated upon their own expulsions, rendering the declared cause of death an obvious fallacy.

“I’ll bet this is bruising. Ordinarily we’d assume it was common inflammation or acne rosacea caused by the recent inhospitable weather, but in this case, I think not. It all makes sense: tainted alcohol to incapacitate, and brute force to extinguish.”

To hear an officer of the law say that these people meant nothing because of their station was an affirmation of Nye’s deepest suspicions.

“Simple: We’re going to catch them in the act.”

“It’s a good plan because it’s a sane plan, James. We can’t take vengeance on Burke and Hare ourselves if they’ve got Crouch’s gang backing them, and the law will continue to turn a blind eye so long as their victims are undesirables and missed only by the likes of us. Burke and Hare will keep killing unless we stop them—and who knows, any one of us could be next.”

(Could it be that these actions were only sinister in my mind, knowing the horrors these two men had committed? Were I not in the know, would I find their manner to be friendly, gregarious, perhaps even charming? It was impossible to tell.)

I will protect their lives as I would my own, or that of any member of this crew. You cherish them, James, and I cherish you. They are therefore as dear to me as family.”

In no time flat, we’d devised our rig; countless nights of practice in the safety of my chambers had prepared us well.

“Nothing more than the bodies we exhumed from the ground? Because I must confess, you have flayed me open, plucked me apart, laid me bare before you, and now you intend to walk away as if I were simply another cadaver on your slab?”

Where the face should be was now a gorgeous rendering of a Lover’s Eye: an intricate portrait of Nye’s crystalline iris,

A sudden flash of memories—of a discarded ear upon the surface of a gritty pub table, of hot wax solidifying in a web of veins, of cerulean blue swirling in a transparent tube, and finally, of a diagram of a heart tacked haphazardly above a bed, conjuring precious recollections of Love, of Joy, of Life.