Once upon a midnight black and clean, to wit my knife did gleam. Cutting to and fro, wringing death for this row. Fire burning in their eyes, twisting heartily with a sigh. Iron metal in my grasp, as wicked as my wrath.
The poetic mind of Dr. Maler continued to chant in silent choir as his hands moved deftly, precisely, moving the instrument of surgery across the wilted, ashen flesh of the recently dead. The cloth mask that covered his nose and mouth dripped with red ichor as the bloated meat spurted putrid gore into the air whenever the harrowed blade sliced through a swollen artery or one of the many buboes that had formed along the cadaver’s dermis. His machinations, his research required one of the freshly dead, although one that had been exhumed after a week of interment would do just as well.
He had been called mad during his tenure at the university. He had been declared insane by self-proclaimed experts. He had even suffered the dark seed of doubt as his initial experiments had failed and fallen by the wayside due to lack of funding and success in equal measure. Seldom was the hand of hope to grace his cheek, but hope was for the weak. For him there was only success or failure, and hope had nothing to do with it.
They had called him “gravedigger” when he claimed an abandoned body that had been left in the mortuary, destined for nothing but the furnaces. The residents of the village he resided within took offence to his scientific mind, muttering crude incantations as they gripped their charms and trinkets, turning away from him as the sun began to fall in the distance. Superstition was the deviltry of an uneducated mind, and he prided himself on having no such flaws.
Grating blood with delight, harken by my fire’s light.
It was a shrewd thing, his mind, as it continued to run dark limericks as he worked. It was a habit he had grown accustomed to when he was still a student in the city, in the university. Cadavers were aplenty there, from the poor, the sick and the unclean, all providing those of the medical profession with subjects in which to hone their trades and hands. Red ink spilled across white aprons, staining clean hands as they dissected and vivisected bodies to learn of the machinations within. He had been especially astute in his first year, laughing at those who retched in writhing sickness as the first incision had been made, as the ribs were pulled apart to reveal the cold organs that they once hid from the world.
The professor for the class of 1839 had taken a liking to him, that much was apparent. A surly man with the brownest of beards and baldest of heads, he seemed better suited to the frozen norths, clad in animal pelt with axe and shield in hand. His stern gaze had brought Maler to tears at one point, not for any unkindness that his peers had viewed, but for the dedication to his trade, the methodical care he visited in all he did. Professor Twir, it seems, was experience made manifest, and Maler threw himself into his tutelage, learning all he could.
As the second year began, Maler was of the few that had been chosen for the next round of studies, given better tools and more access to the university as he was given tasks and assignments that were, by far, in depth compared to the mere mockeries he had been given previously. Professor Twir had even seen fit to loan his personal medical bag to Maler for the year, all but confiding in the student the expectations he had, and the greatness he saw.
To this, a snip and snip, but nary a quip and a quip.
The third, and last year had found Maler among the trio that had been chosen for higher education, the point where they would no longer be considered mere students, but doctors of trade and apprenticeship. Professor Twir himself, although his beard had begun to streak white, beamed at the idea of his best pupil progressing beyond his studies and into the educated world. The assignments were harsh, and the research was dulling, but Maler strove for greatness and accomplishment in all he did. His arms were stained red, his tools dulled after a multitude of incisions and cuts,  and his mind ground into itself.
The first-year students mocked him, the second-year students ignored him, and even his peers- the few that remained- favored him with wary glances. At first he turned to wine to quell his nerves, settling for a glass a night to see him through the long hours of study and research. The cheap red he bought from the market left him with a bitter taste upon his tongue, and for a moment he wondered if he had become, albeit indirectly, a lurker of the night before coming to his senses. Vampires were of no such relation to a man of education, let alone existing on the same plane of thought.
The wine, however, continued to become ever more bitter and oily before he did away with the wine entirely and found himself favoring the thin ale of the village tavern. The faint-yellow ambrosia left his tongue aflutter with pins and needles at the first sip, but his nerves sighed in relief as the alcohol numbed him. His scalpel no longer jittered, his fingers no longer trembled, and he was free to study as he had longed to.
Professor Twir, however, had a narrow view on the gentlemanly pastime of drinking, more so when it was coupled with his agonizing studies. To him, drinking was a crude device for the common man to escape the world, whereas men of knowledge and education delved into the roots of the world with no such luxuries, cleaving their way with science to the very underbelly of Yggdrasil to cleave their fortunes and their earth-shaking revelations.
The university’s angelic visage soon corroded, slowly but surely as the great war erupted. His classes were cut short as the wounded and the dying flooded the halls, nurse-practitioners tending to their suffering until the doctors and surgeons could tend to their wounds. Limbs were treated with ether, deformed lumps of lead were withdrawn from muscle and bone and, should the worst come to pass, the limb itself was amputated quickly and cleanly after the soldier had been put to sleep with bourbon, rye and, if nothing else was available, grain spirits that were distilled in the university’s basement.
As the conflict raged, Professor Twir had started to abandon the long-prophesized apprenticeship and graduation that Maler dreamt of. The focus shifted to the wounded men and women that held to life by tattered threads and nigh-severed veins. As Maler severed gangrenous limbs and sutured rent muscle, his mind drifted to the research he had been forced to forsake. He, be it before or even after a cup of black ale, pondered the ideological advances that could be gained were he to apply his methods to the patients under his care.
Rendered unto me, be you or he.
“A Study into the Living Condition”, the name was soon born of his genius as he took careful notes of the suffering victims. A paragraph of pen-hewn ink of how a wound gushed from a chest, while leaked from an arm. A sentence on how a soldier’s eye appeared, before ether was applied as well as after, before the next sentence detailed how their pupils contracted into pinpricks after epinephrine extract was applied by injection. The screams as a leg was sawn through before the same soldier slumbered after an opiate infusion.
After two weeks, Maler felt as if his research bore no fruit. An insight into how a living body could beat great infirmity and suffering, but it offered nothing into what he had sought for so long. Just how resilient was the body and mind? Could it transcend time and death? Could one of the freshly dead be brought back from the brink before his soul was weighed on the golden scales? The chemicals that the university retained were not in short supply, to be sure, although simple injections of epinephrine, or the self-patented tinctures of tobacco and coca leaves could rouse the deceased. His research, it seemed, came to a crushing standstill.
It wasn’t until the third night of the full moon that he saw the glimmer of salvation, a chance to save all he had strived for. A dreary night, unlike any other a man was brought in on one of the army’s meat wagons, the fatigued horses rearing at the storm that brewed overhead and the thunder that tore through the frigid air. Two of the university’s students had brought in a corpse on a stretcher, intent on bringing him to the mortuary to be burned, lest his earthly coil spread disease and pestilence. Maler had been present as he talked to the carriage driver, questioning events on the front when a bolt of the purest light arced from the clouds overhead with a crack of thunder so deafening that the world seemed to fall silent.
The first-year students had sprawled onto the ground, shaken from the lightning, the body having fallen from the stretcher and laid on the ground like a log. Maler rushed to see if the other students were injured before stopping still as the body twitched and started to move. The soldier, long since dead, sat up and looked around, questioning where he was even as his clothes smoldered and burned into his skin. A moment later he seemed to stop short of his sentence and pitched backwards, his eyes rolling into his head. When checked, his heart had stopped once again and his body curled into itself in the furnace as ashes replaced flesh.
In that bolt of light, that heavenly glow he had found his answer. His research depended not upon the chemicals that altered the condition of the body, but the raw force of nature’s most enigmatic arbitration: lightning. Lightning would revive the body, and his distilled medications would sustain it. At last his research would reach fruition and he would be bequeathed by fate and glory. Alas, as his resolution was plotted, a stumbling block arose in the form of the university itself.
Professor Twir had sat in the university’s library, smoking his pipe as he read “Greod’s Abyss” as Maler retold of his thesis, his predictions, and the research he had performed. Twir regarded him with fatigue, pride and even a modicum of scorn, it seemed as he digested all that Maler had told. The smell of honeyed tobacco betrayed the frown he wore, the darkest combination of sweet and sour that could beheld Maler’s eyes. Twir was overjoyed that, even in this dark time, Maler found the ability to continue his research although the classes had been stopped, although the plot that was laid before him, Maler’s thesis, could not be tolerated.
“Dead is dead”, the response was from the very man that Maler held to the same standards as the patron saint of medicine, let alone the gods themselves. How could a man of such renown, of such ability declare an idea to be worthless before the empirical results could be wrought from the fabric of reality? In that one night, the man that Maler had come to adore, as one would a father, died and in his stead remained one of the first year students, holding him with arrogance and contempt.
Through my fire, I shall behest, righteous waters, in my test.
He performed his duties as he was required by the headmaster of the university, providing aid to the soldiers that were shipped from the front, screaming and moaning as their bodies were broken and destroyed by the furious fighting of empires. At any chance he was given, he stole away into the mortuary and searched for the freshest of bodies, those who had expired merely a day before at the most. None were sufficient for his requirements, besmirched by medicine, by vivisection, and even by incineration.
By this point, Dr. Maler had been reduced to relying on his own stimulating concoction to stay awake as the long hours wore on, abandoning sleep for work and study. Shapes blurred on the edges of his vision, speech became a laborious and even the very act of tolerating his lesser peers became a test of endurance. Even Prof. Twir was regarded as lesser, and treated as such as the soldiers kept arriving.
It wasn’t until the 20th night of the waning crescent that Dr. Maler found the perfect specimen. As night had fallen and as Dr. Maler had successfully amputated an arm, he had been harassed by Prof. Twir regarding his lack of sleep. Dark spots encircled Maler’s eyes, his skin haggard and limp, everything about the doctor twisted into a ghoulish visage, sustained only by coca and tobacco tinctures, even going so far as to use the leaves as a crude chew that he swallowed.
Dr. Maler would have none of it, his distrust of Twir superseding his common sense and anger flared. In one deft move Maler shoved the professor back, spouting obscenities to which the professor rallied against. The world moved in a blur, bodies clashed, and in the end Maler found his hands red with sticky fluid, fingers curled around the scalpel that he had plunged into Twir’s heart, watching his body and the exsanguination that followed.
No. No, no, no. His mind reeled from the realization at what he had done, his mouth sputtering in a babbling, incomprehensible mess of words and sounds. He started to panic, fearing what would be done to him should someone find him and Twir’s corpse, before a small spark of insanity found its way to the surface of his mind. He could fix this. He could bring Professor Twir back, correct the damage that had been done, and prove he was right once and for all.
He wasted no time, plucking Prof. Twir from the floor and strapping him to a gurney before covering him with a sheet. He found a clean blouse and trousers to replace the ones that he had stained with Twir’s life and wheeled the gurney out into the hallway, his shoes leaving red footprints in his wake. So much blood had been spilled in the university at this stage that no one bothered to think twice, even going so far to clean up the mess left behind once Dr. Maler had disappeared down the hallway.
The operating theater, once dedicated to the art of teaching had been shuttered by the headmaster of the university once the first soldiers arrived. Maler forced his way through the doors, a stolen icepick easily jimmying the lock and Twir was quickly wheeled inside. He shut the doors quickly, barricading them with a desk before lighting the storm lantern he had found and confiscated. He had planned to use this theater as a means of producing the proper results with a cadaver, although Twir had forced his hand.
The lights flooded the operating floor and Twir was laid upon the slab before Maler sliced his clothes off, leaving him a bloody cadaver that had yet to stiffen. He broke on of the lights and tore the electrical cords out, using a scalpel to expose and hone the bronze-colored wires before wrapping them around and through the eye of a pair of sewing needles and embedding them into Twir’s temples. This, this was the dawn of a new age. A new era. This, was when Maler would no longer be a mere doctor, but the giver of life itself.
Turmoil, turbulence and terror. Alas I have discovered this through my error.