“Where did you find her current hands?” I asked, following her up the stairs.
“There’s a monastery outside of Quick. They have a graveyard that serves the entire region. It’s where I get most of my raw supplies.”
Raw supplies? I thought. More like body parts.
“The death rate this far north is abysmally high,” she continued. “I had the corpses of three girls her same age to choose from. One was very recent, died in childbirth; it made the transfusion easier. I would have liked to find a corpse more her natural coloration, but there aren’t many Romany in these parts. She didn’t mind. She was so thankful to have the use of her hands again that she dedicated her life to Ballentyne. I can hardly recall how we managed before she arrived. She’s teaching the girls astronomy and philosophy in addition to needlepoint. They might be milkmaids by trade, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be well educated.”
My head spun with questions. Did the monks know Elizabeth took the bodies, or did she grave rob them late at night? She probably sent Carlyle to do the dirty work, except now he was getting on in age. Maybe that’s why she’d been so kind to Balthazar, wanting him to fill Igor’s role as her lurching laboratory assistant.
I followed her up the tower with nervous steps. Each stair took me closer to secrets I’d wished to know ever since I was a little girl, peering through the keyhole of Father’s laboratory. Elizabeth slid her key in the lock but paused.
“Once we go in here, Juliet, there’s no going back. I’ll ask you one more time. Are you certain you wish to learn all of this?”
I pressed a hand against Jack Serra’s water charm beneath my dress, reminding myself that I had to learn my demons before deciding to follow them or not. Technically, I was also staying true to my promise to Montgomery; I wasn’t following my father’s footsteps. I was only standing in the door and peering down that path to see where it led.
A tremor of excitement ran through me. “Yes.”
She opened the door. My greedy eyes took in everything at once: the roundness of the tower walls, which gave the feeling of a giant stone womb; wooden shelves and cupboards; books and papers stacked in piles that were tidy but didn’t have my father’s rigid adherence to order. In fact, nothing about the room brought to mind my father’s cold and sterile laboratory. This space had the touch of a woman, from the apron hanging on a peg, to a kettle and cup of tea that must have long since gone cold. There was even a little painting on the wall, done with childish inaccuracy, signed by Hensley. The only thing at all similar was the operating table in the middle: the same leather manacles, the same sawdust underneath to draw up the blood, now fresh and unsullied.
She turned on a lantern. “What’s going through your mind?”
The room was warmer than I’d expected, with the windows shuttered against the winter wind. Cozy almost, not unlike my attic apartment in London. I had the urge to wrap a threadbare quilt around my shoulders and curl up in my old rocking chair by the fire.
“It feels more comfortable than I’d expected.”
“Good.”
She closed the door behind me and locked it, then returned to the table, where she carefully laid out the body of Hensley’s white rat. It was stiff with rigor mortis. My eyes scanned its tiny feet, the ropelike naked tail. Its fur was matted around its neck in a very revealing way.
“Hensley means to be protective, but he doesn’t know his own strength. Instead of throwing this one out for the foxes, I thought it might prove . . . educational.”
Her eyes darted to the metal pole coming down from the spired roof, and I realized it was the reverse end of a lightning rod. It connected to wires designed to hook onto a cadaver’s body.
“We’re going to reanimate it?” I couldn’t keep the thrill from my voice.
She laid out the rat, gathering several vials and surgical tools from the various cabinets around the room. “No,” she said, flicking her eyes toward me. “I’m going to reanimate it. You’re going to observe and not touch anything. It isn’t a complicated procedure, but it’s a dangerous one, even with a subject so small. Now fetch that clamp, will you?”
I handed her the metal clamp, and she used it to secure several metal wires to the end of the lightning rod, then attached them to sections of the rat. I took in every detail with wide eyes. It wasn’t unlike my own plan for awakening the water-tank creatures: the principle difference being, of course, that those creatures had been alive in a state of stasis, and this rat was quite dead.
Anticipation rushed up my throat, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek. I was going to watch the impossible happen. Death, defeated.
“But it isn’t raining anymore,” I said. “There won’t be any lightning.”
“The windmill provides enough power to reanimate small creatures,” she said. “Rats, rabbits, birds. When I reattach a human’s limb, it also requires a small jolt of electricity to stimulate the dormant nerves. I’ve performed such minor procedures dozens of times. The lightning rod . . . well, there’s only one time when we would need that much power all at once.”
I dropped my voice. “For a body, you mean. An entire human.”
“Yes. The rod hasn’t been used since the professor brought Hensley back to life thirty-five years ago.”
I watched as she finished connecting the wires. After years of studying science out of books, my fingers itched to do the work myself. I had to clasp my hands together.
She glanced up at me. “You might wish to cover your ears. They scream when they come back to life. Even the rats.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My every muscle was riveted to that little dead body on the table. Elizabeth went to the wall, where a lever and dial was attached to the electrical wiring from the windmill outside. “I warned you,” she said.
She flipped the lever.
The entire room hummed in a soft vibration, like crackling in the air before lightning strikes. I could feel electricity in the wires and in the metal inlay of the table. For a few breathless moments, nothing happened. I didn’t take my eyes from the rat. Such white fur, motionless now. Such black eyes, dulled with death.
Would it be very different with a human subject? Humans shared the same basic neurological systems with animals, after all. The same major nerves and synapses. It was how my father had been able to twist animals into creatures that walked and talked.