craniotome

There is a merit to vivisection, and it is this – it has a marvelous way of rendering all things equal. The air is so cold that Seward can see his own breath. The cold makes his hands shake, but the morphine steadies them beautifully. Every moment seems to be stretched out like a thread of silk. He is in death’s house, as surely as all those years ago.

The creature beneath his knife does not breathe. Its blood wells up sluggishly beneath the knife, and stains the canvas, Jack’s shirtsleeves, Jack’s hands. The blood paints his cheek, and he does not think to wipe it away. The creature beneath his knife may be structurally unremarkable, but somewhere within its waking skull is a secret. The wreaths of white flowers around its neck are frozen stiff like molded sugar. Subdued.

Silver chains and wreaths of white flowers. It is strange – the rhyme of it, a fallen friend tracked all these many miles to a makeshift morgue in this country that knows only darkness for so much of the year. Jack has changed with the years, and his quarry has not, except to seek colder climes. Slimmer pickings, one might say, at the ends of the earth.

Quincey had spoken of a desire to venture further north – he’d wanted to be the first Texan to make the Pole, he’d said as much with a smile of absolute confidence. This creature, the thing he has tracked all this way, is not Quincey Morris. It has sharper teeth.

–and he never thought it strange that the chief of all vampires and the wellspring of all their sorrows could be dispatched with a knife? The youngest among them were the most vulnerable, and even now the Count holds his offspring in a kind of limbo, an anaesthetized in-between where no man might reach them. The creature beneath his knife stirs, parting boyish bloodless lips, and Jack fumbles in the cold, not for the saw-blade but for the stiletto. If the tissues of the brain are pared back to only what is necessary for life, scraped and stirred and broken up, there will be a sort of release of personality, a second and scientific un-death – that is the thesis, yet unproven, and this is his specimen. There is a final mystery yet, beyond life and death, and it is nearer to him here than ever.