Page 87 of Her Majesty's Necromancer
I sat quietly while he untied my wrists then remained still as he stepped back out of my reach. He didn't untie my feet, but had no objection when I bent down to do it. The knot was tight and I broke half of my fingernails in the attempt, but I finally got them off. My god, such relief!
"Did you learn to tie knots like that in the army?" I rubbed the raw skin at my ankles then set the rope in my lap.
"I did, as it happens. How much do you know about me, Miss Holloway?"
"Very little. I know you're experimenting on dying men, then testing their bodies after their deaths. I just don't know to what purpose. Or why you've kidnapped me."
"I've kidnapped you because you'll make my experiments so much easier. You can raise the dead, and I wish to speak to the dead. It will solve a host of difficulties I've encountered."
I shook my head. "I don't understand."
"That night at Mr. Lee's establishment, you opened my eyes to a new way of gathering information from my test subjects."
Subjects? Was that what he thought of the men who died after he fed them that liquid?
"I wasn't aware of people like you until then," he went on. "I didn't know it was possible to raise the dead. It wasn't until I got home that I began to consider the applications of your…gift. It could change the way I work and will certainly save a lot of time and effort."
"What work, Captain? What are you doing to those poor men? Killing them?"
"No! Good lord, I'm no murderer. No, I wanted to save them."
"That doesn't make sense. Save them how?"
"They were going to die anyway, Miss Holloway. When I found them, they were already close to death. I didn't hurry the process along, I simply watched them as they deteriorated and grew closer to the end."
"Then what was the liquid you fed them?"
"That was supposed to save them. Well, not save them as such, but bring them back to life."
My stomach rolled. Another mad doctor obsessed with bringing back the dead. Why couldn't they leave them be? "The dead don't want to be brought back to life, Captain."
He scoffed. "Of course they do." He pushed his glasses up his nose. "No one wishes to die. I'm trying to develop a serum that brings the dead to life again."
"Is that what you fed them? That liquid was the serum?"
He nodded. "It must be administered before death."
"And the blood in the syringe?"
"I extract samples for testing. I need to record the changes to the subjects both before and after death. That's why I kept those four bodies in the butcher's cold room."
"You were testing them too."
He nodded. "I took samples from them periodically to monitor changes to their muscle mass and vital organs. I couldn't bring them back to life yet, but they helped me fine tune the serum."
"And how close are you to developing it?"
He sighed and pushed off from the desk. "Not as close as I would like. It would help if I could speak to the subjects about the changes they experience. That's where you come in." He smiled at me. "You'll raise them for me and I'll interview them and perform tests. We'll start today. Bertram Purley will be buried this morning. It's best to start with a fresh corpse."
I willed him to turn around, to take his eyes off me for a moment. But he did not. "Were you experimenting with this serum in the army?" Keeping him talking was all I could do for now, but biding my time grated on my nerves. I just wanted to get out and go home.
He smiled. "It's where I developed and nurtured the idea."
"Until your superiors discovered what you were doing."
He pushed his glasses up his nose again. "On the contrary. They were quite happy for me to continue. They encouraged me. The application of such a serum has enormous benefit for the army, naturally. Ordinarily, when a soldier dies on the battlefield it means they are a man down. But if he can rise again…" His face lit up, his eyes bright in the lamplight. "It would make the British army a strong force, impossible to defeat."
It certainly would. "None of your superiors objected? How many knew?"
