Page 1

September 1993

M oving a corpse in the rain is such fussy, slippery business.

Fat drops slipped into ’s eyes as she hauled along the cadaver by moonlight, rigour mortis making her efforts all the more difficult. She couldn’t see the mud sloshing up her tweed trousers and camel trench any more than she could make out the face of the dead man twice her size.

“These were new boots, you bastard,” she gritted out as she pushed him up against the back of her car and smashed her hip into his weight to hold him there.

She knew it wasn’t his fault. The dead don’t control the weather.

Attempting to keep him in place, she wrangled the keys from her pocket and jammed the correct one into the lock by feeling alone. Her fingers had gone quite numb, but she managed to get the boot of the old ‘77 Granada to spring open.

This was not her first experience with a corpse. No, that had occurred twenty-five years prior, at the tender age of three. Nor was this her first time slinking away with a corpse into the night. Though she usually had a gurney with which to move them. Tonight had been less than ideal. Nothing had gone to plan.

Though was nothing if not clever.

The edges of her vision darkened, a familiar fog rolling in. She winced and the cadaver fell forward against her, his chest colliding with her shoulder and knocking her back a step. Grunting, willed the sharp pain in her head to go away, its ghastly hallucinations with it.

For once, it blessedly did.

But the body slipped from her grip, thunking to the asphalt as hissed a curse. Grateful as she was for the broken streetlights and ominous clouds obscuring the car park and, therefore, her dark deeds, she wouldn’t make it to Achilles House before dawn if things continued progressing at the rate they were. She should have waited for a clear night—or early morning, as it were—but this John Doe had been too good to pass up.

bent over double, sloppily wrapping her arms around the fallen corpse’s middle, and heaved his torso up. Grunting and cursing in a way that would make her mam toss holy water at her, she dragged the dead man up against her chest, muscles screaming.

Maybe she should join a gym.

She almost dropped him again when she snorted at the absurdity of such a thought.

Alas, managed to drag him along.

“Almost there,” she encouraged herself through the strain.

Something about the way his heels scraped against the asphalt as she tugged at him was making her nauseous. Viscera and bone beneath a scalpel or bone saw never made her bat an eye, but this was different. She shouldn’t have been able to hear the disturbing shush of it over the rain, but the deluge was finally slowing and the sound of skin on road felt too human.

No matter that there was nothing human about this man. Not anymore. His soul had gone off to wherever souls go, to haunt or to hallow.

managed to get his shoulders into the boot of the car before he slipped again, and she bit back a cry of frustration. The rain slowed to hardly a drizzle and the full moon broke through the clouds with enough silken light for her to make out the crumpled, nude body, his chest hastily sewn shut.

Another Unidentified Deceased . One more for the pile of bodies in the overrun morgue.

’d been the one to accept him, tag him, and run the preliminary procedures according to protocol. She’d planned to put him with the rest, to be picked up by the gravediggers coming in the morning to take them to the incinerator—as was expected of her. But, come closing time, everyone else had left, and needed to know more about the inner workings of the John Doe. Her fingers had itched with the desperation to investigate.

Thus, she’d snuck him down to her hidden, makeshift laboratory beneath Gallaghers’ Morgue which she’d outfitted with discarded tools received from Achilles House as payment, and began her research with exhilaration in her veins.

With his chest cavity open, all had appeared as expected at first glance. Blood blackened by the Plague, organs failed from the infection.

That was when saw it.

The blossom sprouting from his lungs.

Not a phantom or a trick of the lamplight. Not even a seedling-looking thing one could pass off as an abnormal growth of some sort. No, it was a macabre bloom of foreign flora that had taken root in the man’s lung, and flowered.

Rain sluiced down ’s face, dripping off her lashes. She tore her eyes from the sodden, sewn chest and told herself not to pull that flora from her pocket. Not right now. It was surely already soaked, and she never should have removed it from the body in the first place. Yet, it didn’t look anything like the thousands of botanicals she’d studied in her coursebooks or those in her grandfather’s journals that she grew up with her nose shoved in.

But what was done was done.

Refusing to look at him any longer, heaved and pulled and pushed until she got the corpse shoved into the boot and shut the lid, hopping to press down on it with all her weight like an overfilled suitcase before it finally clicked closed. Huffing, she slid into the front seat, wondering just how sore she was going to be later.

It took three tries for the car to start.

At least the exertion meant she was no longer cold. Still, flicked the heater to full blast in the hope it would dry out her boots some. It made a horrible hissing sound as if mocking her, and blew out only cold air. slammed her fist down on the dash and the whole of the air system shut off.

“Fecker,” she muttered and threw the persnickety car’s gear in reverse.

The streets were still dark, but the flickering dash clock read 5:42 and the sky would begin to lighten all too soon. As she drove, pictured the corpse wobbling and twitching in the boot of the car with every bump in the road, but she hadn’t a second to spare for thoughts of her blasphemy against the dead. She suppressed a laugh. That ship had long since sailed to the Americas.

Nearing her destination, switched off her lights, pulling onto a short gravel drive concealed by a copse of black alder trees.

The first time she’d made this trip, she’d taken the tooth-leafed trees indigenous to Ireland as a sign of good fortune. As a sign that she’d made the right choice.

This morning, they looked like they were mocking her.

bared her teeth right back at them and pulled her car around the back of Achilles House, with its imposing arches and ribbed vaults. Its rough, uneven stone and mullioned windows.

It was a beautiful building, she couldn’t deny that, even if it was unnerving. She slid out of the car, not bothering to close the door, and popped the boot. She’d parked in a way that offered a tidy view of the corpse, and she unwrapped the canvas sheet like she was presenting a gift.

Satisfied, approached the Gothic doorcase that perfectly matched the one facing Merrion Square. Not that she or anyone else ever approached from anywhere other than the concealed back.

banged the open-mawed gargoyle knocker on the thick, polished black wood of the Achilles House door. A long moment passed before she heard the scratchy swivel of a peephole cover sliding against woodgrain. It dropped quickly back into place, and the door creaked open, an increasingly familiar mask coming into view.

They all wore the same plague doctor masks at Achilles House, a clear sign they belonged to one of the secret societies at Trinity, but this anatomist’s was a variation of the classic leather beak and goggles. His mask was stitched in red instead of black. Though had seen some stitched in white as well. It was a way of identifying a ranking system, she presumed.

Gilded as he was by the warm light of the House interior, the black blood on the anatomist’s leather apron looked thick as pitch. He said nothing, the gaslamps framing the door glinting in his round metal goggles as if he was blinking at behind them. He upturned his chin to reveal a dark throat. “Yes?” His voice was muffled by his mask, but easy enough to make out.

“I’ve another cadaver for you.”

“I’ll send someone out.” This Red Stitch never minced words. None of them did. “Payment will be your usual rate.”

He made to close the door, but reached out and pushed against it to find another Mask had joined them, hovering in the foyer. couldn’t tell the colour of this one’s stitches, but it wasn’t red, black, or white. Curious.

“This Infected is different,” she rushed to say. “He showed signs of—” She realised she hadn’t the faintest idea how to explain it. “His lungs had a growth. One of botanical origin.”

The stoic demeanour of the man behind Red Stitch shifted. An unidentifiable thing in his shoulders—a bit like the first twitch of a spooked horse. His posture corrected, and considered maybe she was just seeing things. He shooed away the Red Stitch and met her in the doorway.

Gold . His mask was stitched with shimmering gold.

“Now that is downright mad,” he said, his voice low and menacing, proper and lilting, screaming of old Irish money.

Willing herself not to lash out at the insinuation she’d heard too many times in her twenty-eight years, took a breath before speaking. “I– Sir, I am not mad . I know what it is that I saw.”

Did she, though? She reached into her sodden coat pocket and felt the flora. It was real.

The pain began in her temple this time, a dull thing, growing sharp fangs, and she dropped the blossom to the recesses of her pocket again.

The Gold Stitch came out onto the steps, closing the door behind him and looking over ’s shoulder at the corpse in the boot of her car. “Why, pray tell, would you open a cadaver? We cannot provide payment for a desecrated corpse.”

’s trepidation began to boil into something hotter, volatile. “I’ve done no such thing. I’m well-versed in postmortem arts and autopsy. It’s why I’m able to help you at all.” She stood straighter when he looked down his crooked beak mask at her. “I use the very instruments given to me from Achilles House, and I only mean to get to the bottom of the Plague, as you do.” She lifted her chin and added, “ Doctor ,” for good measure.

The Gold Stitch hissed. “What instruments given to you?” His words were thick as sludge and something writhed within them.

“I requested them. Instead of money,” explained simply.

“Requested them of whom?”

Not that she knew any of their names or had seen any of their faces, but she knew it was a White Stitch and who knew how many of those there were? Regardless, had no intention of snitching on anyone, but her silence was damning enough. She’d only ever dealt with the same man from tonight and a White Stitch gangly lad.

“I see,” the Gold Stitch said slowly when she never responded. “There will be no payment for this cadaver, and you will return all of the instruments in your possession immediately."

’s pulse beat quickly in the hollow of her throat, and she fought against the desire to growl the words as she spoke. “With respect, they are mine now. I provided you with corpses, and they were my payment.” It had mostly stopped raining, but she knew she still looked like a drowned rat and it wasn’t likely to help her case.

The Achilles House doctor took a step closer and clenched her fists at her sides. He towered over her, but if she cowered, she would lose her only access to the tools she needed. It wasn’t like her mam was sending autopsy supplies in her care packages or that she could steal them from the morgue where she worked.

Unlike the surplus of unidentified bodies piling up at Gallaghers’ Morgue, tools would be quickly identified as missing.

“You will return them, or I will have them confiscated.” She had to look up to meet his gaze. “And we wouldn’t want the Provost of Trinity to discover what their upstanding student is doing, cutting open bodies illegally. Now would we?”

ground her teeth together. How did he know she was a student? Or was it just a lucky guess? “Why would I care if you speak to the provost, hm?”

He leaned against the doorframe and the lazy mannerism made her hate him even more. “You have textbooks in the front seat of your car.” He nodded his mask toward where she’d stupidly left her door ajar, the overhead light illuminating the six textbooks she had stacked there. “You seem a bit old for secondary school. Undergrad, even.” His head tilted to one side, the movement birdlike and unsettling. “Graduate student, then.”

“Just take the body and give me my payment,” snapped.

The Gold Stitch turned around and walked inside, slamming the door shut in her face.

snarled at the gargoyle knocker and kicked the gravel, allowing herself a small tantrum. She was halfway to her car when a side door opened and a Black Stitch came out, lugging along a gurney. Unlike the metal and vinyl ones at Gallaghers’, the Achilles House mortuary cots were old , like they’d been stolen out of an abandoned insane asylum in 1893.

He loaded the body up as watched, and Red Stitch came back out to give her payment. “The crotchety one changed his mind, did he?” The Red Stitch didn’t answer her, he merely turned on his heel and walked back inside. It was all over in the span of a couple of moments, and was alone outside in the drizzly cold again.

An uneasy feeling slipped into her veins, thinking of how the gangly White Stitch lad might fare if they put it together that he was the one who usually came out to pay her.

It wasn’t her business.

Cold, tired, and annoyed, returned to her car and she flipped open one of her textbooks, hiding the cash inside nestled next to a diagram of the external morphology and internal anatomy of a Hyacinthus Orientalis, or Midnight Hyacinth.

“Cash is useful,” she told herself as she drove toward campus. It was, of course, but autopsy instruments were necessary for her, too. Familiar friends. The tools she used to conduct her research.

It wasn’t as if she’d had her own when she moved from Galway back to Dublin—she’d always simply used the ones in her family’s mortuary, and when her father called in a favour and got her the job at Gallaghers’ Morgue, she’d begun using theirs.

A few days after moving back to Dublin and starting at Gallaghers’, overheard a couple of transport guys talking about an arm of the hush-hush Plague Research epicentre referred to by the public as ‘the Society.’ According to the transport lads, they’d opened to find a cure and needed more specimens to conduct their research.

saw an opportunity.

The first time the House door opened, and a masked man holding a sternal saw asked, ‘ How much? ’ for a corpse she’d pilfered from the pile of To Be Burned , had taken that opportunity just a bit further, striking a deal.

Giving up her tools was going to be painful. She couldn’t very well allow herself to be expelled or thrown into prison. She would just have to cope. Save up her meager salary and purchase her own instruments. Stay after hours and borrow the morgue’s.

The goal had been to save up for her own place, to live off campus so she didn’t have to hope that Siobhan and Seamus Gallagher never ventured into the basement supply closet she used as a makeshift lab. That wouldn’t be easy to accomplish while handling her class load, but it was at least a minor possibility while making extra money thieving for Achilles House.

The semester had only been underway for two weeks and was already behind in her studies. Maybe keeping Gold Stitch and his anatomists happy would help her in the long run.