The thing on the table jerked to life with a painful squeal. Its cry was a blade to my heart. Thick leather manacles bound its limbs to the corners, but it writhed wildly under the sheet. My sweaty palm slipped on the door latch. I wiped it on my skirt. As terrified as I was, my eyes were riveted to that table.
Father seemed unfazed by the thing’s torment. The manacles strained and rattled, but they held. Father kept cutting, a slice here, another there, as graceful as an orchestra conductor. He hummed a few notes of a melody. The Chopin piece, I realized with a sickening lurch. I caught only glimpses as his hands flew over the creature. A flap of skin, pale and still dripping with subcutaneous fat, pulled back on its shin. A white bit of bone flashing in the candlelight. Father covered it with a towel to stanch the blood, but the towel soaked quickly. He peeled it off carefully and dropped it into the growing pile at his feet. So much blood. It made me tipsy. For a moment my thoughts slipped out of my control, into a primal hunger. What was he doing? This wasn’t just vivisection. It was much more than that.
He was creating something.
He stepped away, clearing my line of vision. I got a look at the leg under the sheet, and my throat tightened. Instead of toes, there hung a stump wrapped in a bloody bandage. No, no, this is wrong. It was my own voice now, not Mother’s. It didn’t matter what he had discovered, what higher purpose he thought he was following. He’d crossed the line into a place you couldn’t come back from.
The thing’s skin looked pale, sickly. He must have shaved the creature, because its leg looked almost human except for the twisting hinge of the knee. I swallowed—I’d seen that same awkward twist before, in Balthazar and the other islanders’ lurching limbs.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. An inkling of what he was doing in that laboratory ruffled my thoughts. He was operating on the islanders … but why?
Father came back with a wooden clamp that he set over the ankle, holding it still. The toneless humming faded as he pressed his fingers delicately along either side of the knee. With a grunt, he threw his weight against the leg and cracked the knee socket, buckling it against the brace.
I cried out. I couldn’t help myself. But the creature’s wail matched my own and drowned my voice. Its cry rattled the glass cabinets. A candle fell from the shelf and crashed onto Father’s hand. He cursed and jerked his hand back, knocking the sheet off the creature.
I looked away, but it was too late—I’d already seen the animal body stretched out unnaturally, limbs splayed like a human’s. Impossible to tell what creature it was or had once been.
My stomach threatened to bring up supper. I blinked back angry, frightened tears. Frightened for the beast, and frightened for myself—for inheriting my father’s sick curiosity. I should have run back to my room and forgotten all of it. It wasn’t the blood or the flesh that made me sick, but what he was doing. Evil. He was what they said he was. A madman. A demon.
A monster.
Through the crack in the door came his voice.
“Blasted devil. Boy, come hold it down!”
He was speaking to someone. I pressed my eye against the door crack. The thing on the table had worked free of one manacle and was rattling the table in an effort to get loose. A second figure appeared from some dark corner, looking ghostly through the screen of my tears. As he approached the candlelight, I recognized the blond hair falling into his eyes, the handsome tanned face. He threw his weight on the thing on the table, pinning it down, and jabbed a needle into its arm. My heart shot to my throat.
Montgomery. He was more than just aware of Father’s experiments—he was assisting him. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Not Montgomery.
My knee slid and knocked into the tin laboratory door. It shook with a loud metallic tremble that made my breath catch. I dared a glance into the laboratory to see Father turn, peering keenly at the crack in the door.
“Who’s there?” he barked. And then, “Find out, Montgomery. Use the dogs if you must.”
I slammed the door shut. My limbs screamed to get away. Run.
But where to? The gate was locked. I was trapped.
I dashed into the warm darkness of the barn, hiding, fleeing, pacing. I glanced at the roof. It was thatch, so there was a chance I could climb through. The wilderness beyond was uncertain, but that was better than the certainty of what was happening in the laboratory. I grabbed a pitchfork and, balanced on top of a sawhorse, thrust it through the roof, dodging falling straw and sticks, until a shaft of moonlight poured through the hole. I hoisted myself up onto the wide rafter beams, kicking my feet, and pulled myself through the thatch into the warm night air.
It didn’t matter what was out there as long as it was away from the truth.