Chapter 43: I Hear Something Strange [2]
Chapter 43: I Hear Something Strange [2]
Right.
No matter what, still.
Huh? Even in the nineteenth century, they would not declare a living person dead and pronounce them deceased…
That should not happen. It really should not.
Without realizing it, I thought back to what had happened earlier.
Ever since coming to the nineteenth century—no, ever since coming to London—I had been making far too many unforgettable memories.
Most of the memories involving people were good ones, but the memories involving medicine usually were not.
No, more than that, they were horrifying.
“To treat a headache, you have to let out blood!”
Maybe because it was too horrifying, the memory had become slightly distorted.
“Come here, you little bastard!”
For some reason, the Jémel in my recollection had Dr. Robert Liston’s face.
First he let blood from the ankle, then from the arm, then from the forehead, and in the end, he used a goose feather to make the patient’s nose bleed.
That damn bastard.
The patient’s complexion had only grown paler and paler.
At that point, the headache itself no longer mattered much.
If blood loss was causing hypovolemic shock, what use was worrying about a headache?
The only fortunate thing was that, due to a lack of skill and knowledge, he had failed to cut an artery.
Bleeding from veins or capillaries could sometimes stop once enough blood had been lost for the blood pressure to bottom out.
And then it would look as though the person were dead.
Would it be easy to diagnose death?
Of course not.
Medical knowledge was needed not only to save someone, but also to declare that someone had died.
“Hey, what are you thinking about so hard?”
“Did you know the person they carried away?”
I had been staring toward the entrance that had just opened and closed—the one leading toward the graveyard—when Joseph and Alfred called out to me.
The two of them still wore expressions hungry for knowledge.
Their gaze shifted back and forth between me and the forearm we had been dissecting just moments ago.
That made sense.
Anyone with a brain would know how important and precious the knowledge we were learning now really was.
“No, it’s not that… I thought he moved.”
“Huh?”
“Moved? But they said he was dead.”
“You imagined it, didn’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“I’m not sure we can dismiss it that easily…”
Joseph nodded at my words, but Alfred’s reaction was somewhat strange.
So Joseph and I both turned to look at our senior.
We were clearly asking for an explanation.
Perhaps because he came from a family that had become wealthy through hard work rather than from some pretentious aristocratic line, Alfred did not hesitate much.
“Haven’t you two… heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Heard what, exactly?”
“Ah… you’re from Upton, right? There are still a lot of places there that do funerals the old way, aren’t there?”
“Huh?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Even then, it still was not clicking for me.
Seeing us both still looking blank, Alfred continued.
“Here, you see, there are a lot of people who don’t even have the money for a funeral.”
“Ah… that… yes, I suppose so.”
Right.
A funeral.
I thought back to the crowds I had seen while riding through the city in a carriage.
The people farming in the countryside probably had a far better quality of life.
Life here looked little different from hell.
If it was like that while alive, then what would it be like after death?
“So they just bury them. Sometimes they even bury them in someone else’s grave. That man earlier, at least, seemed to have received a little money… but even then, he’ll probably end up in a paupers’ cemetery.”
“That… why does that matter?”
“The truth is, it’s just a rumor. Most people ignore it… but no matter how I think about it, it’s strange.”
Alfred had the expression of a conspiracy theorist from an American documentary.
And since he genuinely sounded like he was about to start spinning a conspiracy theory, it was not really an unfair impression.
By the time I came to my senses, we were already tucked away in a corner of the anatomy lab.
That was because Alfred had led the two of us all the way over here.
Some of the others also seemed curious about what we were talking about, but maybe because Colin hated us so much, none of them came close.
“Do you know Frankenstein? It’s a novel.”
For the title of a novel to come up in a corner of the anatomy lab, with cadavers lying around everywhere, and for that title to be Frankenstein of all things.
I rubbed away the goosebumps rising along my forearm.
Joseph, on the other hand, looked completely clueless.
“I don’t.”
“I’ve at least heard of it.”
I did not say that I had read it.
I had not read the novel itself—I had seen it in a Junji Ito comic adaptation.
It sounded like an excuse, but when you were studying medicine, it was nearly impossible to build cultural knowledge on the side as well.
“It’s about a corpse being revived by electricity and all that… but that story didn’t come out of nowhere. There have always been rumors about sounds coming from graves in London’s cemeteries. That the dead come back to life.”
“Oh, come on. Seriously. How could that make any sense?”
At Alfred’s words, Joseph made a visibly uneasy face and waved his hand dismissively.
But seeing him constantly glance back at the cadavers, he clearly was frightened.
That was understandable.
This was an age that constantly talked about science, yet if you dug into the reality of it, mystery was still filling the gaps left by insufficient knowledge.
But I could not respond the same way.
It felt as though a series of sparks had suddenly lit up inside suspicions I had already been harboring.
“You don’t mean… they buried someone alive…?”
“No one says it like that. They say the dead start moving. But I think… somehow, that’s what it is. They’re not Jesus. It makes no sense for someone to die and come back to life.”
“That’s true. Besides… that person earlier…”
“You said it looked like he moved, right? Then the possibility is even greater.”
“Should we follow them? We can always do the dissection practice at night.”
Alfred and I were already moving.
Not toward the gate that led to the graves, though.
Those people earlier—the bereaved family—had gone that way on foot, pulling the cart.
But for us, dressed as we were now, to walk down that road by ourselves would have amounted to a kind of suicide.
It would have been different if a professor were with us, but if the three of us went like this, it was obvious we would get robbed several times over.
“You’re saying we come here at night?”
Unlike Alfred and me, who had already started moving, Joseph looked plainly frightened.
Probably because he had just heard talk of Frankenstein and corpses coming back from the dead.
Well, that’s unexpected.
I had thought he was fearless.
Apparently things like zombies scared him.
That was fine.
Those did not exist.
“We can keep the lights on while we do it.”
“No… I mean…”
“Why, are you scared? Then pray.”
“No, it’s not that…”
“Let’s just go for now. What if they really are burying a live person?”
“Ah… damn.”
Perhaps because I had taken such a hard line, Joseph seemed to run out of arguments, sighed, and came along after us.
“Oh, heading back early today?”
The coachman greeted us cheerfully when he saw us.
Leaving work early was always a good thing, wasn’t it?
Sorry, but I had to tell him that was not the case.
“To the graveyard…? No, why would you go there?”
Apparently that was not merely awkward, but deeply unpleasant.
The coachman—the same man who had looked perfectly bold even in dangerous back alleys—asked the question with his face pale.
His eyes were practically begging us to say it was a joke.
If I tell him we’re going to stop them from burying a live person… that won’t work, will it?
On that point, Alfred, Joseph, and I were all in agreement.
No matter how you looked at it, it sounded bizarre.
“It’s the death anniversary of someone we know.”
“Well, now. You had someone you knew in London? But there… at a place like that…”
So Joseph took the lead.
It would have sounded strange if I said I knew someone there.
Then again, it would also have been strange if Alfred said so.
People of the same class mixed with each other, after all. It would have sounded odd to claim you knew someone buried in a paupers’ cemetery rather than in a family graveyard.
“I see. Well… hmm. Ah, good grief. Then I suppose you can’t not go.”
Even after hearing that it was the death anniversary of someone we knew, the coachman grumbled the whole time as he drove the carriage.
Honestly, it felt like a bit much.
A graveyard.
Of course people would dislike it, but I had been to cemeteries plenty of times myself.
“Ugh.”
“What on earth is this…?”
“The smell of rotting corpses. What else would it be?”
I took back what I had just thought about having been to lots of cemeteries.
For a moment, I had forgotten that this was nineteenth-century London.
A place that showed you things beyond anything you could imagine…
A place like that.
“But they were buried in the ground, so why…”
“Well, the gravediggers would know that.”
“You’ve never asked them?”
“You think I’d willingly associate with the likes of them? They’re people you can’t even deal with.”
The coachman clicked his tongue irritably, then stopped the carriage.
Not right in front of the cemetery, but some distance away.
And, in fact, even the horse seemed to be making a displeased face, so it was hard to ask him to go any closer.
At least the three of us had long since become used to the smell of rotting corpses.
The fact that I had to call that fortunate was… something else, but there was not much to be done about reality.
“Mm.”
“Mmm.”
That did not mean we were fine with it.
The smell coming from an anatomy lab and the smell coming from a cemetery were two very different matters.
When I looked to see why it was like this, I saw that some of the graves had been dug up.
There were even coffins that had been pulled out.
At first, I thought maybe grave robbers had been at work.
No… that can’t be right. What would there even be here…?
If these had been the graves of the rich, it would have been difficult, but still understandable.
There might have been grave goods.
But this was a paupers’ cemetery.
Which meant it was mostly where poor people were buried.
“What brings you here? You don’t look like the sort of people who’d come to a place like this.”
As the three of us huddled as closely together as possible to overcome the basic fear and passed through the entrance, a rough voice called out.
A gravedigger.
I had never seen his face before, but I knew immediately what he was.
Mud-stained clothes, hollow eyes, and the shovel in his hand.
Wow…
He looked like someone straight out of a fantasy novel.
“Th-the people who just came here… where are they?”
“Just now? Ah… you mean that one they said died in an accident over at London College.”
Once again, I was struck by how calmly someone could speak about a death caused by medical malpractice.
This truly was an age with absolutely no respect for life.
“They already went inside.”
“What? Already?”
“Of course. Why drag it out?”
“Then… can you take him back out?”
“The body…? Hmm.”
It seemed that staying here had affected me as well.
Without even realizing it, I had asked him to dig the corpse back up.
While I stood there feeling a bit disgusted with myself, the gravedigger did not respond to me directly. Instead, he looked around.
“The bereaved family’s gone already, I see. Well, it’s not difficult… but there’ll be an extra fee.”
And then he started saying things that sounded like they ought to earn divine punishment.
“If you want the body taken out, you’ll have to pay more.”
Now I understood why the coachman had called them people not worth associating with.
He was called a gravedigger, but he was no different from a dealer in corpses.
“It hasn’t rotted much yet, so it’s a bit expensive.”
The fact that he was even pricing it by condition meant he really was a professional.
This was not the practiced ease of someone who had done it only once or twice.
Anyway, now that money had come up, my right to speak had long since disappeared.
I turned to look at Alfred.
Normally Joseph would have been included too, but he was so frightened that he was just staring at the ground.
Of course, my look alone was enough to convey that I meant for Alfred to pay.
“Again?”
“I’m poor, sunbae.”
“Wow… so now you’re using honorifics?”
“Are you trying to get someone killed?”
“Hah…”