Clockwork Hearts [extract]

This is an extract from my WIP, which is set in mid-Victorian London. Here the narrator (Victor) is trying to bring a dead girl (Lenore) back to life. 

I saw Newman for a moment still and bowed in the darkness, then the gate clicked shut and I took Lenore into my cellar workshop.

It was pitch black inside, but I successfully navigated my way by touch to the table and laid Lenore down on the work surface. I struck a match and lit all the lamps I could find. I could have gone upstairs into the house and got more, but I didn’t know if Effie had left the house yet. She usually left around ten—what time was it now? It didn’t matter, this was enough light. I lit the big lamp hanging from the ceiling above the work table, and it swung back and forth on its chain sending wild black shadows climbing up the walls and into the corners before I steadied it.

Lenore lay on the table in her white wrappings. I took a deep breath, went to the cupboards and began laying out my tools. The big hand saw, the little hand saw, needles, catgut, carbolic spray, clamps, swabs, forceps, tweezers, scalpels, kidney dishes; and here, from the sterile secure box in the locked cupboard, I took out the bellows-pump. It gleamed dully in the lamp light, shining brown and grey, and the sight steadied me. This would work. She was dead, so it would take a little more work than I had expected, but it would work. I could do this. I could do this.

Kettlesing arrived just as I finished washing my hands. He was scowling, and kicked the door shut behind him, demanding, ‘What the hell happened?’

‘She died,’ I said.

‘What? I thought she was good for another month!’

‘Evidently not.’

‘But you can still do it, yeah? Fix her and resurrect her and...’

‘Yes. Don’t touch anything, it’s all been cleaned. Wash your hands.’

‘All right, all right, I know.’

I pulled down my goggles and took up the scalpel. Lenore’s skin was the dead dull colour of old fish scales, the metal scalpel obscenely bright against her mottled flesh. Kettlesing sat on the steps, his shirt sleeves rolled up and his hands held away from his body. ‘So that’s Lenore,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Victor. Are you sure you can do this?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I lifted Lenore’s small white arm and made the first incision through the skin from her right armpit, under her sternum to the left armpit. The blood welled up around the edges of the cut, but it was dark and sluggish, and I quickly swabbed it away, and inserting my fingers in the opening, peeled back the skin on both sides of the chest and clamped it in place.

Kettlesing made a tiny gruff noise inside his throat.

‘If you’re going to vomit, there’s a bucket by the door.’

‘’Course I’m not going to bloody vomit.’

‘Make sure you wash your hands afterwards if you do.’

‘I’m not going to sodding vomit.’

Another incision into the fatty tissue and muscle. More blood seeped through. Swab. The flesh was dark red, almost purple in places, raw and still juicy, and it was warm under my fingers as I pulled it back to reveal the ribcage. Clamps. I paused a moment, wiped my forehead on the back of my wrist and picked up the small hand saw and set its teeth against the costal cartilage of the eighth rib close to the sternum. It bit into the bone with a rough growl, and I braced the body with one hand, keeping it steady to avoid splintering. The cartilage gave way easily, and I worked my way down on both sides. Eighth rib, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth. I removed the eleventh and twelfth, and took a handspan of bone on each side of the sternum from the eighth, ninth and tenth ribs and dropped each piece in the tin tray by the work surface where they glistened with red dribbling stains of blood.

The shadows flickered on the wall. The river sighed softly to itself.

The ribs were still attached to the spine at the back, but now I could reach the lungs, which had already collapsed. They were riddled with the tubercular cavities, patches of what should have been healthy red tissue now blackened with the disease. There was the bronchial passage, and here my fingers held the right lung. There. Now the scalpel moved. 

‘Thread.’

The thread was put in my hand. I tied off the blood vessels, then cut the bronchial passage. Now the right lung was free, and I lifted it out of the body and placed it in the tray. Now the left lung. Here, close by the heart, then out and in the tray. They lay together like miscarried twins, red and foul and bloody, the dead black tissue staring up at the shadows on the ceiling. More thread, slipping between my red fingers. More blood vessels. And now remove the windpipe, just the lower section, with enough left to join to the bellows-pump. There.

‘Get another tray.’

The bellows-pump was luminous under the shadows, the brass metal plates glowing into gold and silver. It fitted into the chest cavity under the sternum, the sawn-off edges of the lower ribs fitting into the grooves on its sides, allowing the mouth of the tube with the wirecoil inside to rise out of the ribcage. The heart slid into position in the hollow on the left side, and I attached the tiny pins to keep it in place, and then more to the true ribs. The wirecoil bent under the sternum and up, and I held it straight, then released the clamps and smoothed back the slabs of flesh into place, then the skin.

‘Needle.’

The needle felt strange in my hand after the scalpel, too small and too narrow, but the suture was clean and straight, a line of black stitches walking across the chest, down and up and down and up again. Very black against the white skin. No matter. Now the brain.

Turn the head sideways. Back to the scalpel. A small incision at the back of the head under the hair, then my fingers curled underneath the flap of skin, and I pulled up the scalp to expose the skull. It was pink underneath, red blood, white bone, darkly pink. I cut through the skull with the drill saw and made a small hole an inch in diameter. A hollow needle full of the infusion of piperonal and absinthe injected directly into the brain stem, and immediately after, the long brass dynamo pin. My hand skidded on the dynamo handle as I wound it around and around, and sparks jumped as the current leapt along the pin. Sparks dancing devil-bright and wicked. Blood on my hands, blood smears on the handle. The sweet smell of the piperonal. Dynamo humming and buzzing. Connecting the wirecoil in the chest to the box with the trough battery. Crackle of power. Sigh. The bellows-pump contracted and with a gusty sigh, the chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and there, a faint quiver under my finger on the limp wrist, a pulse, growing and gaining strength. Turn off the dynamo and draw out the pin. Now pull down the scalp and suture. Clean the inside of the mouth and throat free from blood and mucus. Her heart was thumping away, forcing the blood back into life, her whole body quickening back to life under my hands.  

Kettlesing’s voice seemed to come from a very long away, as though at the end of a tunnel. ‘...Victor.’

I couldn’t speak.

‘Victor. Victor.’

I coughed, said hoarsely, ‘Yes.’

‘Have you—are you finished?’

I looked down and for the first time, saw Lenore. Her mouth was a little open, and I could see the gaps in her gums. My fingers had left bloody prints on her face and throat. The purple mottling of livor mortis was already beginning to leave her skin as the blood started to flow again.

My throat was very dry. I had prepared a basin of salt water, and I sponged the body clean and spread tansy paste over the suture marks.

‘What’re you going to do with her now?’ Kettlesing’s face was grey.

‘Put her in the side room. I made up a bed there.’

‘Is she alright?’

The hiss and creak of the bellows-pump was very loud.

‘We’ll know when she wakes up,’ I said.

‘When’ll that be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘God Almighty, Victor.’

I took off my apron and left it on the surface. I scrubbed my hands and arms and splashed water on my face, then lifted her in my arms, carefully, carefully. She was heavy now, the bellows-pump weighing her down, and there was a stiff pain in my back and shoulders.

Outside, the dawn birds had begun to sing.