The sound grew louder, a scrape-tap, scrape-tap. Unaccustomed to being in a laboratory, Lucy threw me a puzzled look. But I knew that sound. The scrape of scalpel on stone. A gesture surgeons made to clean the flesh from the blade between cuts.
Adam threw open the door. A half dozen students huddled around a table in the center of the room, over which a single lamp formed an island of light. They looked up when we entered, and then after a few seconds their faces relaxed with recognition.
“Adam, you cad, get in and close the door,” said one of the students. He threw Lucy and me an annoyed look. “What are they doing here?”
“They’ll be no trouble. Right, ladies?” Adam raised his eyebrow, but I didn’t answer. A good part of me contemplated bolting out the door and leaving them to their sick lark. Yet I didn’t. As we drifted closer with hesitant steps, I could feel the stiffness in my bones easing, as though releasing some pent-up, slippery curiosity from between my joints.
Why were they in the operating theater after dark?
Adam peered over the surgeon’s shoulder. Their bodies blocked the table, but the metallic smell of fresh blood reached me, making my head spin. Lucy pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. Memories of my father flooded me. As a surgeon, blood had been his medium like ink to a writer. Our fortune had been built on blood, the acrid odor infused into the very bricks of our house, the clothes that we wore.
To me, blood smelled like home.
I shook away the feeling. Father left us, I reminded myself. Betrayed us. But I still couldn’t help missing him.
“They shouldn’t be here,” I murmured. “This building’s closed to students at night.”
But before Lucy could answer, the scrape of the scalpel sounded again, drawing my gaze irresistibly to the table. We stepped forward. The boys paid us little attention, except Adam, who moved aside to make room. My breath caught. On the table lay a dead rabbit, its fur white as snow and spotted with blood. Its belly had been sliced open, and several organs lay on the table. Lucy gasped and covered her eyes.
My eyes were wide. I felt vaguely sorry for the dead rabbit, but it was a far-off sort of thought, something Mother might have felt. I wasn’t naive. Dissection was a necessary part of science. It was how doctors were able to develop medicine and how surgeons saved lives. I’d only ever glimpsed dissections a handful of times—peeking through the keyhole of Father’s laboratory or cleaning up after medical students. After work, in my small room at the lodging house, I’d studied the diagrams in my father’s old copy of Longman’s Anatomical Reference, but black-and-white illustrations were a poor substitute for the real thing.
Now my eyes devoured the rabbit’s body, trying to match the fleshy bits of organ and bone to the ink diagrams I knew by heart. An urge raced through my veins to touch the striated muscle of the heart, feel the smooth length of intestine.
Lucy clutched her stomach, looking pale. I watched her curiously. I didn’t feel the need to turn away like normal ladies should. Mother had drilled into me the standards of proper young ladies, but my impulses didn’t always obey. So I had learned to hide them instead.
I looked back at the rabbit. Creeping vines of worry wound around my ankles and up my legs.
“Something’s wrong.”
The student performing the surgery glanced up, irritated, before selecting another scalpel and returning to work.
“Sh,” Adam breathed in my ear. My chest tightened as my eyes darted over the rabbit. There. The rabbit’s rear foot jerked. And there. Its chest rose and fell in a quick breath. I clasped Lucy’s hand, feeling the blood rushing to the base of my skull.
My brain processed the movements disjointedly, with an odd feeling like I had seen all this before. I gasped. “It’s alive.”
The rabbit’s glassy eye blinked. My heart faltered. I turned to Adam, bewildered, and then back to the table, where the boys continued to operate. They ignored me, as they ignored the rabbit’s movements. Something white and hot filled my head and I gripped the edge of the table, jolting it. “It’s not dead!”
The surgeon turned to Adam in annoyance. “You’d better keep them quiet.”
“It isn’t supposed to be alive,” Lucy stammered, her face pale. The handkerchief slipped from her hand, falling to the floor slowly, dreamlike. “Why is it alive?”
“Vivisection.” The word came out of me like a vile thing trying to escape. “Dissection of living creatures.” I took a step back, wanting nothing to do with it. Dissection was one thing. What they were doing on that table was only cruel.
“It’s just a rabbit,” Adam hissed. Lucy began to sway. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the operation. Had they even bothered to anesthetize it?
“It’s against the law,” I muttered. My pulse matched the thumps of the frightened rabbit’s still-beating heart. I looked at the placement of the organs on the table. At the equipment carefully laid out. It was all familiar to me.
Too familiar.