Pax Britannia: Human Nature (27 page)

And he could see other things now behind the man, beyond the glare of the lights - walls of crumbling red brick, metal work surfaces, a range of wheeled stands and gurneys bearing all manner of surgical instruments and devices.

The cold knot of nausea took hold of his guts and twisted. He tried to speak again, but panic and his sluggish tongue conspired to ensure that nothing comprehensible came out.

"I shouldn't try to speak," the other suggested. "I would just relax if I were you. It's better that way." The man wasn't looking at Ulysses as he spoke but was busying himself with laying out the tools of his trade, ready to set to work.

Ulysses swallowed, grimacing at the taste of stale saliva and old blood in his mouth.

He tried to speak again. "Where's Jenny?" he managed.

"Jenny? Who is this Jenny?"

"She was with me," he struggled, slurring his words with the effort of speech.

"Ah, I understand now," the German said, as he continued to prepare for whatever was to come next. "All in good time, Herr Quicksilver. All in good time."

Ulysses craned his head forward in an attempt to see what the man was doing. For a moment, in the reflecting glare of the lights, he saw quite clearly the serrated blade of a bone-saw.

Ulysses felt sick. With a sudden shout of frustration he kicked and bucked, a part of him knowing that it wouldn't make any difference, but the fighter in him knowing that he had to do something, that he couldn't just lie there and wait for this strangely bespectacled other to decide his fate for him.

"Now, now, Herr Quicksilver. Struggling will only make it worse."

With one last muscle-tearing convulsion of effort, Ulysses relented and fell back on the table. His skin was cold against the bare metal, as the sweat of his exertions began to evaporate.

"Who are you?" Ulysses hissed through gritted teeth.

The man turned to face him again and this time Ulysses realised that his spectacles had been fitted with decreasing sizes of magnifying lenses, that could be flicked down in front of the main lens as and when required. They gave the impression that his eyes were too big to fit within the orbits of his skull.

"I am sorry, Herr Quicksilver, how rude of me. Where are my manners? You must forgive me. I was so caught up in my preparations... But, that is not important. I am Doktor Seziermesser and I will be your surgeon for the duration of this procedure."

Ulysses' mind raced.
Procedure? What procedure?

"You!" he gasped. "You're Mr Bellerophon."

"I am sorry, but you are mistaken, Herr Quicksilver. No, I assure you, I am Doktor Seziermesser." Ulysses could hear the 'k' in doktor quite clearly.

Seziermesser. Seziermesser.
Where had he heard that name before?

"I thought you had already met my employer."

"What?"

"I am afraid that it was because of me that he had to create the alternative persona of Herr Bellerophon. The mermaid's escape was the result of carelessness on my part. But do not worry, I have been suitably punished."

He held up his left hand - or at least the stump of where his left hand had been. In its place a prosthetic metal claw had been strapped to the knot of pink scar tissue that covered the nub of his wrist. The claw itself looked like it had been cobbled together from whatever had been lying around the lab that day.

"I am a surgeon, a master craftsman," Seziermesser continued, gazing at the stump and the artificial claw, a glazed expression on his face. "In fact, I like to think of myself as a sculptor, but one that works in flesh. My hands are my tools. That was why it was only right that I should lose one in payment for my recklessness. But have no fear, I have become quite adept at using this replacement."

The surgeon's voice belied no sense of malice or sarcasm. Instead he appeared suitably chastened, and seemed to bear his master no resentment for what had been done to him.

"It was only right that Herr Umbridge have his man show me the error of my ways. I was becoming distracted from the great work, my life's greatest accomplishment. Indeed, the greatest accomplishment in the history of vivisection!

"And perhaps, if I do a good job on you, when the great work is finished, perhaps Herr Umbridge will deign to let me replace it with something more... appropriate."

Ulysses watched as the man's eyes fell on his own hand, but was only half aware of the fact that it was his right hand which he was regarding with such lascivious intent. There was nothing else for it, nothing else he could do, and although he had tried the self-same thing already, he couldn't let this madman take him apart like a Sunday roast, and so struggled against his bonds again.

"Here, this should help you relax."

Ulysses felt the stab of a needle being thrust into his arm and gasped involuntarily. He was dimly aware of a curious sensation of cold spreading along his arm as the injection was delivered directly into his bloodstream.

The surgeon returned to laying out his scalpels, clamps and bone-saws. Ulysses felt the effect of the drug almost immediately, a strangely welcome warmth taking hold of his aching muscles and easing him back down onto the table, taking him to the very edge of unconsciousness.

But still that name haunted him.
Seziermesser
- where
had
he heard it before?

Heard it, or read it?

"Very good. I think we are ready to begin," the surgeon said, turning back to the operating table and Ulysses' prone form.

"Such a fine specimen," he said, starting to run the fingers of his right hand over the flesh of his arms and torso. His dancing fingertips felt like spiders scuttling over his exposed body. Inside Ulysses raged and riled in frustration but on the outside there was nothing he could do now to resist Seziermesser's probing touch.

Seziermesser. Seziermesser.

And then the memory surfaced from the depths of his subconscious like some great Biblical leviathan. Dark, forgotten domes, tanks of something like rancid primordial soup, indistinct shapes suspended in the slime - arms and legs, webs of skin between their digits, gills where necks should be - faded parchment labels and a name, written in a spidery copperplate;
Seziermesser
.

"Marianas," Ulysses hissed.

"Ah, yes. I understand now. I was still a young man then, a protégé of the late Doktor Waldman, a leader in my field; a trail-blazer, you might say. Just defected from the Frankenstein Corps - with your father's help, as it happens - with wonderful new opportunities ahead of me. And then it all went wrong, but not as a result of
my
work, I can assure you!"

"But that is all in the past. What we are concerned with today is the future, Herr Quicksilver; the future of the human race. So, let us begin."

Ulysses tried to say something else, but his thoughts were becoming clouded. It was as if he were sinking into himself, his mind wandering in a world of its own, as if mind and body were no longer quite one.

A piercing scream cut through the fastidious quiet of the operating theatre, rebounding from the broken brick walls.

"Ah, such sweet music," Seziermesser said distractedly, as if savouring the agonised sound of a body in torment, and then, flicking another lens down in front of his glasses, returned to his work.

Dreamily Ulysses turned his head in another attempt to see what the doktor was doing. Eyes struggling to focus, he saw the crimson tip of the scalpel blade and then watched as it entered the meat of his arm again, as the surgeon made a neat incision right around his arm, just below the ball and socket joint of his shoulder, the man apparently unperturbed by the screaming that now filled the dank chamber.

And in the split second before he lost consciousness, lost in a world of shock and pain, Ulysses realised that the screams were his own.

ACT THREE

The Fall of the House of Umbridge

November 1997

Chapter Nineteen

The Menagerie

"There. There it is again," the creature slurred, angling its chin upwards and putting its head on one side, as if that, in some way, helped it to hear more clearly. But there certainly wasn't anything wrong with its hearing - despite everything else that appeared to be physically wrong with it - for Nimrod could hear the sound now too, a gaggle of mewling voices, yammering cries and woeful wails.

Nimrod found it hard to think of the creature as a man: it was the deformities that did it. He looked at the poor wretch again as they moved through the semi-darkness together. Nimrod was no medical man, but it occurred to him that the creature was nothing more than a collection of tumours, his wretched body hung with a conglomeration of abnormal growths. Most noticeable, of course, were those that disfigured his face, giving it a grotesquely asymmetrical structure. The right side of his visage was swollen with sub-dermal growths, that made his ear protrude far from the side of his skull and pulled his mouth into a perpetually open maw.

But the left side of his face hadn't been saved by whatever disfiguring condition it was that he was undoubtedly suffering from. His forehead above his left eye jutted a good two inches from his brow. Hair covered only some parts of his head, the rest bare areas of warty grey scalp. In fact, in the suffused light of the lantern, all of the creature's skin appeared to have the same rough texture and grey tone.

And his disfigurement wasn't just restricted to his head. Even through the rumpled suit of coarse grey cloth, Nimrod could see the lumps and bumps that afflicted the rest of his body. Again, the right hand side appeared to suffer from this condition the most. Certainly the creature's right paw was a twisted, swollen thing with fingers entwined into a club-like fist.

His semblance was more monster than man. It was little wonder that Nimrod had almost killed him on first sight, although he had soon discovered that it was not, in fact, the first time they had met. The wretch had been following he and his master ever since their run in with Inspector Allardyce of Scotland Yard.

Nimrod had not stopped to ask the deformed young man, but he would not have been surprised to learn that his condition was incredibly painful. The strain on his neck alone, in having to support the over-sized head, must have put a great strain on his whole body.

But for all that, he moved agilely and without drawing undue attention to himself, even though he was wearing a battered pair of mismatched boots. And then he stopped, head tilted to one side again.

"Creature, what is it?"

"I heard a scream."

"A man or a woman?" Nimrod pressed. He hadn't heard anything other than the distant background noise of plaintive cries and slack-jawed moans. Certainly nothing as clear and chilling as the cry of a traumatised soul.

"A man. And I would prefer it if you called me Jacob."

"I'm sorry?"

"I would prefer that you not call me creature. My father saw fit to give me a name and I would rather you addressed me by that name."

Knowing that the thing had a name only served to trouble Nimrod's mind further; that something so inhuman should have such a human name.

"Very well, Jacob," Nimrod said uncomfortably. Something approximating a smile formed on the creature's blistered lips. "The scream: from which direction did it come?"

"The way we are heading."

Nimrod's heart went cold.

"Then let us press on."

As they wended their way onward through the dark Nimrod considered what a sudden reversal of fate he had witnessed. One minute the monstrous freak had seemed intent on smashing out his brains on the rock wall behind him, and then, in the next instant, Nimrod had found himself faced with a cowering wretch, as monstrous and as malformed as anything he would have expected to see stuffed and mounted in a glass display case as part of Cruickshanks' Cabinet of Curiosities.

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" the thing had wailed. Nimrod had been almost as surprised by the fact that the creature could speak as he had been by its appearance.

With his gun levelled at the creature, he had carried out his interrogation.

"What are you doing here?"

"I am here to save her."

"Who? Who are you here to save?"

"Miss Jennifer."

"You mean Miss Haniver."

"Yes."

"But how do you know she is here?"

"I followed her - I followed you all - from the lodge."

"You saw what happened there?"

"I have worked it out."

"You worked it out?"

"I was not there."

"You didn't witness the attack?"

"No."

"The beast had nothing to do with you?"

"Nothing, I swear on the Holy Cross - on my mother's grave - I had nothing to do with it!"

"Then how did you know to come to the house?"

"I... I followed
you
there."