The Resurrectionists Read online

  Inside her chest cavity beat her purple heart. The organ was a frenetic muscle, chaos and fury bound into beating purpose. As the tissues on either side flexed, the heart bounced within its thin pericardial sac, jangling with wild intent around the space afforded it within the mediastinum. It was rhythmic and beautiful, a perfect organic machine. It jogged insanely, like a hare driven mad with fear and seeking escape from the butcher’s block.

  He cut swiftly, severing the organ from its roots within the thoracic compartment. His gloved fingers slid beneath the heart as it slowed and pumped its last, then he pulled it free. Few things in life, he had discovered, were as satisfying as holding a human heart in one’s own hand, and it sent a ripple of pleasure through him.

  “Quickly now,” a soft voice demanded.

  The beaked doctor turned swiftly to the laboratory table behind him, where he placed the heart in a metal construct. Wires led from the small vertical cage to a nearby voltaic pile. He twisted a knob on the cage to push a pair of small metal disks into place on either side of the heart, completing the electric circuit. The muscles of the organ twitched and jiggered, forcing unenthusiastic gouts of blood trapped within the heart’s chambers from the shortened arteries.

  “It works,” a woman said, sotto voce.

  The beaked doctors exchanged glances in turn, some nervous, others broiling with excitement. All eyes turned toward Dr. Richard Bayley as they waited his final judgment. At last, he said, “We can begin.”

  Chapter Two

  Swine, sent out the previous night to devour the trash left behind by thirty thousand illiterates, clogged the dirt streets of Manhattan. The loud-mouthed barkers selling slaves along the riverfront broke the early-morning quiet.

  Maneuvering past cows and goats, Hereford marched down Broadway to New York Hospital. His every footstep was a noisy squelch through a churned slush of mud—and worse. Hereford had a day of lecturing medical apprentices on the subject of anatomy ahead of him. His enterprising students would have no doubt procured the necessary bodies for their lesson, and his face wrapped in a thick woolen scarf to keep the biting cold air at bay, he mentally prepared the notes for today’s topic as he walked.

  Lurking at the back of his mind, though, was the sight of a human heart slowly beating, throbbing, outside its female host. The dark early-morning hours had been wondrous, and he could not shake the image of the woman’s heart installed in a metal cage, arcs of electricity encircling it and revivifying it. Such a vision was beyond glorious, and it instilled in him, as well as his fellow beak-masked surgeons, much hope for their future prospects.

  Once her remains were no longer necessary for their ceremony, the woman Hereford had operated upon had been broken down through a rigorous routine of dismemberment by the accompanying plague doctors. Saws and blades were applied to the joints of her legs and arms as the surgeons operated in tandem to take apart the useless body and wrap the removed segments in cotton before they were placed in bags for disposal. Although cadavers for medical study were at a premium, Bayley was adamant that their professional standards be kept separate from their extracurricular experiments, allowing them to maintain a measure of purity in both. Hereford couldn’t help but find it a touch superstitious, and he had argued as much before their small committee, only to be overruled.

  Hereford had retreated to his apartment for sleep before his morning lecture, and by the time he arrived at the hospital, the woman would be scattered across the small island of Manhattan, her limbs sunk in the harbor or donated to the pigs for their morning sup. Some parts of her would discreetly be sold to soap boilers and tallow chandlers, her uses for science exhausted while several avenues for commerce remained. Those auctioned fatty segments would make for fine bars of soap or candlesticks. More than likely, Hereford thought, she was more useful in death than she had been in life.

  Walking through the thick, icy slop, he rubbed at his burning, tired eyes. Although he had slept, it had not been untroubled. More than a decade after the war, the bleating screams of tortured men and musket fire too close for comfort still woke him easily and with troubling frequency. An hour of sleep, at best, was all he had been afforded, and it seemed that nearly as soon as he had shut his eyes, they had snapped open once more. The lingering noise still echoed in his ears—grown men howling around a bite block as the amputation of various limbs reduced them to a malodorous, infantile state.

  Hereford had trained in London prior to his arrival in the young colonies. The war, however, had truly made him a doctor—and something other than a doctor as well. He recalled quite clearly rushing onto the battlefield of Camden, feeling the birth of something new and revelatory within himself, even among the field of so many dead.

  Sweat pouring down his face in the extreme August heat, the air tinged with gun smoke and blood, he strode through the field, surrounded by pained moaning. The British had marched through the night. Just after dawn, they had met the advancing regiment of Americans, many of whom were sick from dysentery or beset by the heat. The British had struck first, killing a number of Virginia militiamen before launching a bayonet charge. Almost immediately, the militia was sent scrambling into retreat, taking the American commander, Major-General Horatio Gates, into flight with them.

  The coward, Hereford thought.

  After less than an hour of fighting, a thousand Americans were left dead and wounded, with another thousand taken captive.

  Blood soaked the field, and flies were already gathering in droves over the carcasses, landing upon men too wounded to shoo them away. A susurrating, buzzing cloud maneuvered through the fog hanging over the field, traveling from host to host, seeking nourishment.

  Attracted by the sweat pouring off him, the deafening cloud encircled Hereford’s head as he cut a path through the killing field. He breathed through his mouth, one hand held to his face in an effort to keep the flies and the stench of fresh shit at bay. All night, the men had been shitting bloody water, holding their bellies, and complaining of aches and fevers. For many, the British succeeded where the dysentery failed. Those who had been praying for death the night prior had their dark wishes answered on an August dawn.

  Clothes sweat-glued to his body, Hereford stepped between the bodies, sorting the living from the dead as he passed. For some, it required no more than a mere glance to determine if they were animate. For others, their state of being was immediately apparent. Scores upon scores had been run through with bayonets, killed during close-quarters combat when British forces charged the right wing, assaulting the remnants of a militia already decimated by the redcoats’ opening volley. Those who had not retreated were slaughtered, a task made all the easier for the British as the Virginians lacked both bayonets and adequate training. Others had taken musket balls to their vital organs, with steel shot through their heads, hearts, or throats. And others still had been felled by muskets then pierced by blades to finish them off.

  Maneuvering through the grisly scene, he directed his assistants to separate the wounded. Through dark clouds of flies, he saw a second ephemeral form, distinct in its own right, darker and wispier than those of the carrion insects. Flitting through the air, it would find and settle atop a corpse, like an illicit lover taking the men into its embrace and sliding over their torsos. Needles of black vapor curled into split lips and threaded its way up the nostrils, enshrouding the individual’s head in a constantly stirring sack of mist.

  Hereford stood stock-still, his pulse racing, flies alighting along his gore-slicked arms. Over the last four years of fighting, of rushing onto battlefields to haul away maimed, writhing bodies, he had learned fear and developed a keen appreciation for the body’s natural instincts. He had come to know what it was like to live perpetually afraid. Yet the fear he felt in that moment was unlike any he had felt previously. Even as cannons and muskets fired and men fought to death in melee combat, fighting with bayonets and knives and swords, he had still found the will to move. With this unnatural mist shifting across th
e fallen, Hereford found his legs unresponsive, his tense spine glued straight. His mouth had gone dry, his tongue thick and heavy as it sat in a hollow cave of parchment. Despite the extraordinary heat, his teeth chattered, and he wished his legs could gallop as forcefully as his heart pummeled his breastbone.

  Tendrils stretched away from the mist, unnaturally long and quite nearly transparent in its thinness. After a moment of study, Hereford recognized them as arms—first two, then four, five, and six of them seeking the edges of the body the otherwise-formless shape had attached itself to and reaching out to explore the neighboring bodies.

  To the left of the fog was a wounded Virginian, his hands pressed tightly to his belly. Hereford could make out the purplish bulge of intestine pushing forth between the man’s bloodied fingers. Head arched back, the veins on either side of his neck protruding, his struggling face a rictus of pain, the man screamed loudly—the surest sign of life Hereford had ever seen.

  As the mist encountered the wounded man, his screams grew louder and panicked. His heels kicked uselessly at the ground, pushing through earth sodden with bodily fluids. Flowing from the corpse and onto the wounded man, the black fog enshrouded him fully, wrapping tendrils around the man’s thick neck as if to choke him. Fingerlike lengths of mist floated over the man’s chin, sneaking into his mouth.

  Hereford watched in morbid fascination as the Virginian’s screams sputtered into garbled chokes and his face empurpled beneath the shifting, translucent darkness. As his head arched farther back, the bulge of viscera peeping from between his fingers plopped forward. His hands fell away as intestines burst forth from the wound. Steam rose from the man’s mouth and curled into the air, drifting several inches above him before becoming lost to the sky. Then, his gagging finished, his arched back settled into the bloodied mud, and his head sank to the side. The mist lingered, creating small traceries of black smoke pulled from the man’s nostrils—what Hereford initially understood to be his dying breath. Then the body was perfectly still. The mist came alive, slinking off the expired soldier, and inched its way toward another one of the felled militiamen.

  Revolted, but also deeply curious, Hereford studied the black smoke as it fed off the third body. When a fly landed on his tongue, he realized he was standing with his mouth agape in equal measures of wonder and horror. With his arm, he swiped at the sweat sheeting down his forehead, instantly turning his sleeve sodden and black with moisture.

  “Do you see this?” he asked, turning toward an assistant. But the other man was gone, carting a body downfield toward the medical tent. Nobody living was near to answer him, and the absolute loneliness of his predicament crashed upon him. He stood alone in a field of the dead, inhaling fecund air ghastly enough to taste. He looked back toward the roiling black fog in time to see it stretch into the air above a fresh corpse, fanning out and dissipating until it was lost fully to the sky.

  After several moments, Hereford collected his wits. Shaken, his nerves wrecked by the mystery he had witnessed, he was eager to return to his duties nonetheless. A number of patients still awaited triage. And perhaps, if they could not be saved, their deaths could yet summon the oddity for further inspection.

  New York Hospital rose in the distance as a cold wind whipped across Hereford’s face, violently pulling him away from his decade-old thoughts. He had not seen that sentient, animate fog again, but its possible presence was never far from his mind, particularly during surgeries when the veil between life and death was razor thin. And although he had not seen it himself, he had heard tell of the fog’s arrival elsewhere and in different forms.

  Several of his fellow medical practitioners had spoken in hushed whispers of strange sights during the war, when acres of farmland had been turned into killing fields and gravesites heady with the stench of blood that lured forth impossible abominations. To some, it appeared as a mist similar to what Hereford had seen. To others, the dying were preyed upon by slick-looking, featureless creatures blacker than a starless night, their long-limbed forms mounting their victims to inhale soldiers’ dying breaths.

  He’d never seen anything matching the latter description, but he hoped to satisfy his curiosity one day. He hoped, too, that the evening activities he took part in with the small group of doctors who formed the hospital’s secret inner circle of physicians might yet lure forth such anomalies. That was the end goal, or one of them, at least. Hereford was not a Christian, but he had seen enough of life and death to believe in the beyond and whatever may exist between this world and the next. As men and women of science, they sought answers, and the secrets to so many of life’s mysteries could only be divined in the study of death.

  Approaching the hospital entrance, he couldn’t help but think of the redheaded corpse their small group had studied the previous night. Hereford had examined her exactingly as she lay unconscious and bound to the operating table, committing as much detail as he could to memory. A warmth grew in his crotch, even as he forced aside the alluring mental imagery of her luscious thighs and the pliability of her flesh as his fingers sank into her skin.

  They had been unable to summon forth life from the void, but not for want of trying. As he opened the door and stepped into the hospital, he could still hear the sizzle of blood from her heart frying as electricity struck it. Scientific studies such as theirs needed to be rigorous, thorough, and required extensive experimentation. Last night’s experiment had not been successful, but it had not been an utter failure, either. They would try again and again and again, for as long as it took.

  Chapter Three

  Prince’s printing had grown stronger, even if the lines he drew were unsure, ill-formed, and oddly slanted on the paper. But he was learning, and that was the important part. Salem Hawley ran the eight-year-old through another round of the alphabet, making him write out the twenty-six letters in capitals and their lowercase counterparts.

  “That’s good!” Hawley said, admiring the child’s chicken scratch. He couldn’t help but smile. The letters were small and grouped tightly together, which Hawley understood to be a representation of the child’s shy, quiet personality. Over the past few months, the letters had at least gotten larger and bolder, as had Prince’s esteem. Knowledge was power, and the boy was quickly learning he was stronger than he gave himself credit for.

  They spent time working on Prince’s numbers—he could count to five with little trouble but needed some extra encouragement and gentle reminding to hit the first double-digit number. After a few cycles of counting, the time came for the boy to tend to his afternoon chores and clean out the chicken coop.

  Warming Hawley’s heart before the cold outside froze his body, Prince wrapped his arms around Hawley’s waist and gave him a tight hug. “Thank you, Mr. Hawley.”

  “You did good today, Prince. I shall see you tomorrow.” After slipping on his leather overcoat and encircling his face with a scarf, Hawley donned a hat and made his way out of the house, hands buried deeply in his pockets. The air was biting viciously, and strong winds lashed at his skin with a whip-crack sharpness, a feeling Hawley recalled all too easily. Sheets of snow blasted into his face, stinging his eyes.

  Pigs grunting caught his attention, and he frowned in dismay at the sight. The barrel-shaped animals were covered in filth, their hooves buried in sewage, their snorting nostrils nearly inhaling the wretched muck as they fought over their treasure. As their rotund bodies shifted, Hawley caught sight of curled fingers and a stretch of gray forearm that terminated at the elbow joint. The swine had torn away chunks of flesh, leaving jagged, bloodless holes devoured down to the bone. One jockeyed its way between the others and seized several fingers with a biting crunch, snapping them loose with a self-indulgent wag of its curly tail.

  “Damnable beasts,” Hawley muttered to himself, carrying on his way. He shook his head ruefully, cheeks burning beneath his wool coverings.

  Earlier in the month, he and a number of the city’s other free blacks had attended a council meeting
to petition for the end of desecration to the Negroes Burial Grounds. The potter’s field had been routinely looted by medical students in need of bodies for their anatomy lessons and dissections. The city’s night watch did little to prevent it, focusing their efforts on protecting the white cemeteries. Meanwhile, Negro burial plots were ransacked by teams of resurrectionists, the corpses of friends and family stolen away in the darkest hours of night. Their hacked-apart remains were scattered around the filthy island for the pigs to feast on and for birds to pick at.

  Acid boiled in Hawley’s stomach, his blood up and nerves rankled. The heat of anger was a welcome distraction from the February freeze, and with some surprise, he found himself banging harshly up the steps to his apartment with little recollection of the trip that had brought him there. Gluttonous pigs and the dark thoughts of body snatchers were the last thing he truly recalled before his mind slipped away in a fog.

  A small chortle escaped his throat, and he removed his hat, beating it against his leg to knock off the snow. He reached the landing to the third floor and maneuvered down a creaking hallway to his small room. The womenfolk were busy cooking their men meals for the afternoon, and a variety of African spices tinged the air. Everything from jerk to cinnamon, with dashes of cardamom, ginger, and harissa, mingled with the smells of boiling goat meat and veal. Voices echoed above the odors, a litany of accents, dialects, and languages, each distinct from another. The apartment complex housed Africans, Caribbean islanders, and more, all freed during the war, their freedom either bought or won.