Forth in Silence

WARNINGS: Graphic descriptions, human dissection, and mild language

Rock 'n' Read

*

“He’s a very nice specimen,” complimented Dr. Sevier, although it was barely a compliment in his typical flat murmur.  “Very clean-looking.  When did you pick him up?”

"Dug him up,” corrected Toderick feebly, thinking of the layers of mud that had ruined his trousers and a pair of his favorite boots.  “Two days ago.  All he was missing was the left leg below the knee, and that finger there” – he gestured to a finger that had been attached by needle and thread – “so I put those on yesterday afternoon.”  He pushed his hair back and pulled on the dark, rubber working gloves, turning away from his mentor to rearrange the tray of metal instruments.  His hands were shaking, and scalpels and scissors and thick needles clinked together when he didn’t mean them to.  He dropped one as he picked it up.

Dr. Sevier was eyeing him silently, like a stately old owl watching a mouse scurry in circles.  “You ought to relax.  You’ll butcher him if carry on trembling like that,” the Undertaker added, his tone a little softer.  His apprentice, Toderick Mortimer, was already twenty-two, but this would be the first reawakening he’d performed completely unassisted.  He had reason to be nervous.

The subject Toderick had selected looked no more than a few days dead, just as Dr. Sevier had always told him was the best sort of subject for zombification.  It was just a boy, really, no older than nineteen and possibly younger.  He had hair the color of wet straw that stuck up wildly in a few different directions, and his clouded eyes were pale blue, staring lifelessly into the unmortuary’s ceiling.  Toderick reached over with a gloved hand and gingerly closed them – a customary politeness before beginning the ritual.

The Undertaker watched as his apprentice pushed back his reddish-blonde hair again, this time with his wrist since he was already wearing gloves.  He must be sweating under the pressure, the poor thing.  Then Toderick bent over his boy, taking an ink pen to the pale, shirtless chest and tracing lines over what would be his first incision.  He drew a slow, neat Y from across the collarbone to the base of the ribcage, as if he might as well have been performing a regular autopsy.

The cuts came soon after.  To Dr. Sevier’s relief, the apprentice’s trembling subsided once he’d begun to repeat the steps he’d practiced so many times – cutting down the sternum, peeling back the folds of skin like opening a book (a book that stunk like death and the first stages of rot), wiping the sternum clean until both men could see the white bone and the protected organs underneath, then taking the bone saw and tearing into the middle of sternum until it broke open at Toderick’s prying fingers.  He forced the ribcage apart with a grunt, and there it was: the dead boy’s unbeating heart, wedged uselessly between two unbreathing lungs.

Toderick’s black gloves were slick with bodily refuse by now.  He had only grim determination on his face as he slid a hand carefully into the chest cavity, wiggling the heart from its spot and following his first hand with a scalpel in the other.  It was such an improvement from the apprentice’s first day, Dr. Sevier remembered fondly, when he’d bolted from the room and lost his lunch in the bathroom sink.  But he’d been Toddy back then, only twelve years old, so his distress was understandable.  He wasn’t Toddy anymore, the Undertaker reminded himself, looking at the young man with a cut-out heart sitting in the palm of his hand.

The rest of the ritual was especially meticulous, but Toderick was doing well.  He slid the heart into a jar of liquid and screwed it shut, then turned his attention to the open-chested dead boy.  Wood shavings were the filler of choice to pack up the hole left by the removed heart.  Toderick carefully tugged the sides of the split ribcage back together, then held them there as he reached behind him for a mallet and nails.  The nails were thin but sturdy, forged specifically for the purpose of zombifying, and Toderick held several between his lips while placing the first one on the cut sternum.  The mallet had to be wielded carefully so as not to splinter the bone; one it was hammered into one piece again, only two steps remained: stitching and enchantment.

Dr. Sevier wasn’t worried at all about Toderick’s thread-and-needle skills; the apprentice was downright domestic when it came to his sewing.  It was Toderick’s magic that concerned him.  He wasn’t the most gifted enchanter, and the Undertaker had seen proof of it over and over in the ten years he’d attempted to improve him.  Some just weren’t born with the knack for witchcraft.  It was a problem, Dr. Sevier knew, but how much of a problem…well, that was yet to be seen.

Toderick knew it, too.  His nervousness returned full force, his hands trembling again as he set down his tools and pulled off his bloodied gloves.  His stitches suffered a bit from the shaking, but he still finished sewing up the boy’s chest in respectable time.  Then he turned to retrieve the ritual chalk Dr. Sevier had given him just a day or two earlier – long and dark red, and meant to be dipped in water to ease drawing on human skin.  Toderick had a small cup ready on his tray, of course, like the perfectionist he was.

At this point Toderick consulted his copy of the old texts recording the classic zombification process, since he couldn’t yet draw the right symbols from memory, or at least didn’t trust himself to.  This was the sole part of the process Dr. Sevier had never allowed him to practice, since it was impossible to practice such an enchantment without executing it; so Toderick had seen the ritual thousands of times, but never once tried it himself.  His trembling was much worse now.

Once the symbols were copied onto the dead boy’s sewn-up chest, Toderick put his chalk aside and took a deep, shaky breath.  The Undertaker remained silent, never offering a word of encouragement or confidence.  It would only be a distraction.  The apprentice flipped to a different page of the zombification manual, then held his free hand over the dead boy’s chest as he read the words of reawakening.

“Augete hoc corpus, augete illum a mortuis…”

Somewhere in the middle of the recitation, the symbols drawn on the zombie’s chest began to let off thin streams of smoke, which meant the magic was taking.  So far, so good.  Toderick seemed to gain a little confidence, speaking louder.

“Libera animus evagetur, libera voce loqui…”  He hesitated, then pressed his hand fully against the boy’s chest.  “Aperi oculi iterum… Et vivificet eum et sine corde.”

*

Sawyer was floating in nothingness, surrounded by a deep black.  Maybe he was floating in a dark lake.  At night.  A dark lake at night?  Truth be told, he had no idea where on earth he was – or if he was even on earth, for that matter.

Suddenly, a sharp and terrible pain started in his chest.  It was as if someone had torn him open, then set him on fire.  He tried to scream about it, but nothing came.  He wasn’t even sure if he moved.  But then, sure enough, he felt it: the sensation of a surface beneath a twitch of his finger.

From there feeling trickled into his entire hand.  It was his right hand, he thought.  Then sensation crawled up his arm, connected with the shooting pains in his chest, and traveled from there to the rest of his appendages, until he could feel at least something in nearly all of them.  He still couldn’t feel his feet very well.  Gradually he regained his sense of position and balance, and very slowly realized he didn’t feel upright.  In fact, he was lying on his back.

His hearing returned a little spottily, fading in and out quickly and then more slowly, until finally he could understand that there were voices around him.  It took longer to understand their exact words, but he knew right away that the voices were unhappy.  One in particular sounded desperate, then angry, then angrier.

“Wake up, damn you!”

Something thudded sharply on Sawyer’s aching chest, and he jerked.

The voices (he could tell now that there were only two, both men’s voices) gasped together and withdrew.  One suddenly sounded overwhelmingly excited.  “He’s awake, sir!  The rotting bugger’s awake- I’ve done it!”

With huge effort – it felt as though they were completely dry and stuck together – Sawyer opened his eyes, and a bright blur eventually morphed into the figure of a young man, reddish-haired and pale-faced and clad in a stained apron.  The man was leaning over him, uncomfortably close for another man to be to his face.  But since Sawyer was lying flat on a hard surface – was he on a table? – there wasn’t a lot he could do about this personal space invasion.

The aproned man was eyeing Sawyer with an inexplicable fondness.  What on earth is this fellow doing with me?  Is he some kind of sick deviant?!  Sawyer thought suddenly.  SOMEONE SAVE ME BEFORE HE DOES THINGS.  Then Apron Deviant spoke.

“Hullo,” he began, tilting his head at Sawyer’s intense frown, “welcome back.  Can you hear me?”

Sawyer continued to frown, his eyes wide as he blinked multiple times to fix their dryness, but he nodded.

Apron Man looked proud of himself, turning to beam at the stiff-looking, silvery gentleman behind him.  The older man smiled back and studied Sawyer with a critical eye.

"Do you remember your name?” asked the younger man.

Sawyer nodded again, his expression changing to one of concentration as he tried to find his voice.  He thought he located it and started to say his name.  “Mmrr-rr.”  He froze.  His jaw wouldn’t open right; something felt strained or out of place or stuck, but there was no pain accompanying it.  His jaw just didn’t want to work.

The aproned man’s face was starting to turn green.  He looked immediately alarmed, leaning back from Sawyer a little as if to give him more space to function.  Sawyer responded by trying again to make his jaw open like it should, but it refused to drop further than maybe half an inch, barely enough to part his lips.

“Mrrrrngg!”

“Oh, no,” breathed the younger man, his face now gone from green to colorless.  “Oh, no… Speak.  Can’t you speak?”  He whirled around to face the silver-headed man, everything in his manner begging for help.  The older man had stiffened even more, his lined face sinking into a solemn frown.  The young man turned back to Sawyer with look of pure despair.

But not as much despair as Sawyer.  His full senses came flooding back to him at once and he shot up, bolting into a sitting position and realizing his legs were strapped to the table.  It was a table, after all – and it looked suspiciously like an operating table.  The two men leaped back from him as Sawyer thrashed his arms around in confusion, making the closest noise to a scream he could and accidentally knocking over a tray of surgical tools.  Then he saw the stitches.  Stitches in a Y-shape along his bare chest, sewing up a long slice through his flesh that somehow wasn’t inflamed or red.  As if – Sawyer remembered everything with a start – as if he hadn’t been alive when it was made.

He’d been brought back.  But how was that possible?  He’d died, and now here he was, perfectly alive again…he thought.  But maybe he wasn’t.  He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t feel his feet, he couldn’t understand why the metal table beneath him didn’t feel cold.  He screwed up his face in agony, trying again to open his jaw, and screamed as much as he could.

The younger man in the stained apron clapped both hands over his ears, shrinking away.  But the silver-headed man stepped forward quickly, lifting an arm and stretching his open palm towards Sawyer’s face.

"Vade ad somnum!”

The last thing the zombie saw was the Undertaker’s cold stare watching as he fell backward onto the table, pulled instantly into the numbness of sleep.