Authors: Andrew Lane
At one point he passed by a building that, according to the sign outside, was the place where the local newspaper was compiled, printed and distributed. He had discovered before that local
newspapers were valuable resources of information, and equally valuable ways of getting messages out quickly to a large number of people. He had no intention of ever having to do that again, but
then, he had never had any intention of doing it before, but that hadn’t stopped it from being necessary in the past.
He grabbed lunch from a stall outside a tavern and kept on going, hitching lifts on hay-wains and carts so that he could get farther out into the surrounding countryside. By dinnertime he had
seen outlying villages such as Jericho and Sunnymede, Wolvercote and Cowley, and in his head he had a more or less complete map of the whole area.
Towards dusk, as he was thinking of getting back to Mrs McCrery’s lodging house to be ready for dinner, he found himself walking past a long brick wall. He was somewhere near the canal: he
could smell the water and hear the voices of the bargemen as they called to one another. The wall was about ten feet high, and halfway along it was a set of gates. He was walking at this point,
waiting for a passing cart that could take him back to the centre of Oxford, and he slowed down momentarily to look through the gates.
He saw something that he had seen before, but from a different direction.
It was the house that he and Matty had seen when they were on Matty’s barge, heading into Oxford. He could only see a corner of it from the gate, but he knew instantly, instinctively, that
it was the same place. His heart felt as if it lurched inside his chest as he looked at it, and he had the oddest urge to put his head on one side and squint in order to make sense of the
construction of the house.
Even though he could only see a fraction of the place, it still appeared as if the various lines and angles that made it up didn’t make any sense. He was reminded of the conversation
he’d had with Charles Dodgson about the elements of Euclid. According to Euclidian geometry the interior angles of a triangle always added up to 180 degrees, but looking at the house Sherlock
wondered if there was another kind of geometry entirely, one in which the angles of a triangle added up to less than, or more than, that, and in which parallel lines could actually meet at some
distant point. The house gave the impression of being
skewed
, as if a giant hand had taken it and twisted it slightly, so that everything was out of true.
Despite the warmth of the day, he suddenly felt cold. He shivered. This was not logical. This was not
right
. Buildings couldn’t inspire
feelings
like this, surely. They were
just stone and brick and plaster and lathe. They couldn’t inspire
dread
in the way that this building did. He was obviously hungry, and this was making him dizzy. Either that or the
sun had caused a slight case of sunstroke.
A clattering behind him made him turn expectantly. If this was a cart heading for Oxford then he could ask for a ride. He could lie back and rest, and hopefully be more like himself when he got
back to Mrs McCrery’s. Once he had some food inside him, he would be fine.
It wasn’t a cart; it was a carriage, constructed from black-painted wood and pulled by two entirely black horses. The driver was dressed in black as well: not just his clothes, but his
broad-brimmed hat and the kerchief which was tied over the lower part of his face. Only his eyes could be seen, and in the late-afternoon sun they looked black too.
The carriage slowed as it approached the gates. Sherlock stepped out of the way, on to the grass verge. The gates opened, apparently by themselves, as Sherlock couldn’t see any evidence of
anyone pulling them. The horses turned into the gateway, and the carriage began to follow. Sherlock looked up into the window, and froze.
All he could see inside the carriage was a hand, resting on the lower part of the window frame. The hand was large and pale, and a crimson scar ran around its wrist. Other scars, also a livid
red, ran around the bases of the fingers, where they joined the palm. A further scar ran up the arm, away from the wrist and into the darkness inside the carriage. All of the scars bore evidence of
having been stitched at some time in the past.
And somehow Sherlock knew that he was being watched from inside the carriage by eyes that regarded him with interest but no emotion. Cold, empty eyes.
The whole incident took just a moment to play out, and then the carriage had passed him by and the gates were closing again. Sherlock stared after it, trying to work out what had just happened.
The house might cause strange feelings of panic within him, and whoever lived there seemed to have the same effect. The owner and the property were perfectly matched.
He half walked and half ran along the wall to the corner, where the road went one way and the wall went off at a right angle – or maybe something that was close to a right angle but not
exact. Sherlock headed away from the house, along the road, and felt a weight gradually lift from his mind.
What
was
that place?
Twenty minutes later a cart came along, and he hitched a lift back to Oxford with the farmer who was driving. Several times along the way Sherlock tried to ask the man about the house that he
must have passed, but each time the words caught in his throat. He just didn’t want to raise the subject.
After twenty minutes of silence, it was the driver himself who spoke first. ‘You ought to be careful, wandering around them woods.’
‘Why is that?’ Sherlock asked, thinking that the man was going to raise the subject of the strange house himself. Instead he said, ‘Folks are saying there’s some kind of
creature wandering around. I don’t give it much credence myself, but other people say they’ve seen it – some godless thing that’s been made out of bits of dead bodies, all
sewn together. They even wrote to the local newspaper about it, but nothing happened. Like I say, I’ve never seen anything, but I still wouldn’t wander around them woods by myself. You
never know.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Sherlock said. He remembered the man he’d seen in the carriage that had driven into the strange house. His wrists had been marked with scars. Had
someone glimpsed him in the shadows and drawn the wrong conclusion? ‘Thanks for the warning.’
Back at his lodgings, Sherlock had time for a quick wash and a change of clothes before dinner. Three of the other lodgers were absent – probably eating in college – and Sherlock
shared a quiet meal with the theologian, Thomas Millard, and the mathematician, Mathukumal Vijayaraghavan. Nobody had very much to say, and Sherlock went straight to bed afterwards.
Coming out of his bedroom the next morning, he bumped into the lanky Paul Chippenham coming down the stairs.
‘Got anything on today?’ Chippenham asked, pulling on his jacket as he passed Sherlock.
‘Nothing,’ Sherlock admitted. ‘I thought about taking a look around Oxford – maybe going out on the river. What about you?’
‘Lectures,’ Chippenham called over his shoulder. ‘We’re doing gross anatomy – the structure of the skeleton and the arrangement of the internal organs.’
‘I thought you were studying natural science?’
‘Biology is part of that, and anatomy is part of biology. We’re running a book on which of the students gets sick first and has to leave.’
Sherlock’s brain spun for a few moments. Lectures in anatomy? That sounded fascinating.
‘Could I come along?’ he called after the student. The sound of the words coming out of his mouth surprised him, but a moment’s thought confirmed his split-second decision. Why
limit his subjects just to logic and mathematics, and why limit his teachers just to Charles Dodgson? Why not take advantage of all the teaching that Oxford had to offer?
Chippenham looked back up the stairs, frowning. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said finally. ‘There’s usually spaces at the back. Just don’t draw attention to
yourself, don’t ask any questions and don’t, really don’t, be sick.’
‘I promise,’ Sherlock replied.
‘We need to get a move on though. I’m late as it is.’
Sherlock followed Chippenham down the stairs and out of the house. The older student ran down the street, round the corner and towards the imposing facade of the college, with Sherlock doing his
best to keep up. He waved at the Head Porter, Mutchinson, as he passed, and the man saluted smartly back. Chippenham ran around the edge of the lawn and ducked through a side-arch, with Sherlock on
his heels. They were both panting by this time. Sherlock glanced up to where he remembered Dodgson’s rooms as being, but there was no sign of the man at his window. Another two archways, and
diagonally across a paved quadrangle, and then Chippenham was rushing into a narrow doorway and up some stairs.
At the top of the stairway, a door opened on to a lecture theatre. Sherlock had been expecting something like one of the classrooms back at Deepdene School for Boys, where he had initially been
educated – desks lined up in rows with a teacher in front at a blackboard – but the room he found himself in was more like the theatre where he had seen the violinist, Pablo Sarasate, a
few weeks before. The stage was smaller, and the slope downward from the top row of the audience to the bottom was much steeper, but the general feeling was similar. Except, he noticed, that there
were no seats. Instead, the students were lined up – in some places crowded up – against a series of railings that ran around the edge of their balconies.
The noise was very much the same as in the theatre, with all of the students apparently talking at once to their neighbours, or yelling across from one side of the lecture theatre to the
other.
Sherlock and Chippenham had come out on the top balcony. Chippenham quickly wriggled through the crowd, moving down the nearest set of steps to where a group of his friends were based. Sherlock
stayed on the top row and found himself a gap in the crowd where he could stand against the railing and look downward.
They were just in time. The lecture hadn’t started yet, but the lecturer himself was in position. Beside him was a table, covered with a white cloth. On the table, covered by the cloth,
was a lumpy object that Sherlock, with a slight chill, realized was probably a dead body.
The lecturer was a tall man with bushy eyebrows and a bald spot on top of his head that shone in the glare of the flickering gaslights that were placed around the lecture theatre. Sherlock could
smell the press of all of the students’ bodies, as well as their various shaving lotions and hair tonics. Beneath that smell was the smell of the burning gas, and beneath that was a sharp
smell, like disinfectant.
The lecturer stepped forward. Immediate silence fell. He was obviously highly respected, or a strict disciplinarian, or both.
‘A word before we start, gentlemen,’ he said in a deep voice that carried to every nook and cranny of the tall room. ‘Shortly you will watch me as I take a body apart, piece by
piece, demonstrating to you at every stage what the various bits do and how they are connected to the rest. Next year you will, if you are allowed to return to this college, take a body apart
yourselves. These are important – even vital – parts of your education. If we go back in history, people have believed all kinds of odd things about the human body that have turned out
not to be true, and that have only been proved false by direct observation of the
insides
.’ He paused, gazing around with his penetrating eyes. ‘Please remember two things,
however. Firstly, bear in mind that students in your situation are fortunate enough to be living in an enlightened time, when students who wish to become doctors or surgeons are able to see how the
human body works by examining an actual human body. There have been times, not that many years ago, when such things were forbidden, for religious or for ethical reasons. Secondly, these bodies,
which we so casually dismember, were once living people, and that they have donated their body voluntarily for your education. Treat them with the respect they deserve.’ He placed his hand on
the sheeted body beside him. ‘This is Mr Adam Bagshawe, lately of this parish. We are indebted to Mrs Rachel Bagshawe for donating her husband’s body for the purposes of medical
research, as per the wishes expressed in his will. I may inadvertently refer to Mr Bagshawe’s body as “it” later, as if I was referring to a piece of machinery, or a block of
wood, but try to keep in mind, as I will try, that there was once a man’s soul inhabiting this machine, this block, and that he had loves and hates and desires similar to yours.’
The students were mesmerized by this introduction. Glancing around, Sherlock could see that the lecturer’s words had hit home. A few of the students were swallowing nervously, presumably
imagining that one day it might be them lying on a table in a lecture theatre, rather than the unfortunate Mr Bagshawe.
The lecturer plucked at the sheet covering Mr Bagshawe’s body, bunching the material up, and then paused. He glanced around the lecture theatre again, frowning.
‘You may have heard talk around the town,’ he added, ‘or perhaps seen reports in the local newspapers, that parts of human bodies have been stolen from the local mortuary in
recent months. It may have occurred to you that these thefts have been, in some way, connected to this course of lectures – either to obtain fresh specimens for us to use here in front of you
or, perhaps, by more mature students undertaking some form of grotesque homework. I can assure you that the former is not true – every body that we dissect here has been provided whole, by
the family of the unfortunate deceased. I can also assure you that if any students were found to be obtaining body parts illegally, by theft or other means, so that they can conduct their own
research after hours, they would be immediately dismissed from the college, and prosecuted to the full extent that the law allows. We do not – I repeat, do not – countenance that sort
of activity. Do I make myself clear?’
He was silent then, staring around and meeting every set of eyes that was fixed on him, until a murmur of assent rippled around the room.