Chapter 44: I Hear Something Strange [3]
Chapter 44: I Hear Something Strange [3]
No matter how you looked at it, our senior… our senior was a bit of a pushover.
“Hehe. Then I’ll raise it up for you.”
It was not just that he paid instead of me.
Judging by the look of things, he seemed to have paid quite a bit above the going rate.
The gravedigger, who had been curt the whole time until now, had suddenly equipped himself with twenty-first-century service spirit and kept smiling at us.
It did not help much.
No one could tell how he managed himself, but chunks of things were missing from him, and he had not even washed his face properly, so he looked a complete mess.
Hmm.
More than anything, there was a faint smell of corpses drifting from him.
That was strange, because even if he was a gravedigger, it was not as though he should have had that much cause to handle bodies.
Creeeak.
Anyway, while we waited for a moment, the gravedigger attached a pulley to the ring fixed to the coffin and hauled on it with both hands.
I had no idea why there was a rope wound around the coffin in loops, much less why it had been buried exactly like that…
They had not even covered it with earth.
Was he planning to sell it off if the chance came?
Well, the times were what they were, and this was London, which might as well have been another name for hell.
Anyone could come up with the idea of selling corpses.
But where?
Why?
And for how much?
The more I thought through those questions one by one, the less rational it seemed.
At least the cadavers Dr. Robert Liston obtained were either unclaimed bodies with no one to bury them, or bodies handed over directly by the bereaved even if they did have family, so it was different.
“Ugh.”
Anyway, despite barely having any teeth left, the gravedigger hauled the heavy coffin up all by himself.
“Here, come over here and take a look.”
Even so, dragging the coffin all the way over to where we were seemed to be too much for him, so he waved us over instead.
Well, there was no reason not to go.
So we ran over.
Thump! Thump!
As we approached, I heard a strange sound.
Something was knocking.
The source was clearly the coffin.
“Did you hear that?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn it.”
It was not just me. Alfred and Joseph had both heard it too.
The problem was that the gravedigger was standing there with a perfectly calm face.
“Um… can’t you hear that?”
I asked as I started untying the rope around the coffin.
The gravedigger answered in a bored voice.
“If you’re too sensitive, you can’t work in a place like this.”
It was absurd, but at the same time, it sounded oddly convincing.
Well, if you were too sensitive… then of course you could not work in a place like this.
Even so, how could he pretend not to hear something that obvious?
Scrrrk.
Anyway, we worked hard to untie the rope.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Maybe because of all the commotion, the person inside seemed to struggle even harder.
Now the coffin lid itself was rattling.
“Uh… this is not good.”
Only then did the gravedigger react.
But it was not the reaction I had expected.
He was coming over holding a shovel.
No matter what came out, he clearly intended to smash it with one blow.
“H-hey! I think there’s someone alive in here!”
“That can’t be. It’s a body from the hospital… of course he’s dead. Haven’t you even seen Frankenstein? You have to kill this thing. Otherwise…”
“Joseph.”
“Huh?”
“Subdue him.”
“Ah.”
I thought about the patient.
I did not know his name, and to be honest, I did not even know his face properly, but that did not matter.
He came to the hospital because he had a headache, and some son of a bitch cut his ankle, cut his arm, cut his forehead…
What was this, some kind of internal purge?
Then they even made his nose bleed, declared him dead, handed over a little consolation money, and sent him off to a paupers’ cemetery.
He was still alive, but neither the bereaved family nor the gravedigger cared and just buried him inside.
Then by some miracle, he managed to get the lid open and come back out, only to be beaten to death with a shovel?
If I died like that, I felt like even I would come back to life.
“Excuse me, sir.”
So I sent Joseph in.
Compared with Dr. Robert Liston, he fell a little short, but he was still a large man.
For one thing, he was nearly ten centimeters taller than the gravedigger.
“W-what?”
And despite his rough appearance, the gravedigger seemed weak when it came to living people. He could not even swing the shovel and only kept backing away.
Clunk!
In the meantime, I moved to open the lid together with Alfred.
No, rather, I would have done so if Alfred had not suddenly grabbed my hand.
“Why?”
“Y-you don’t really think a corpse came back to life, do you?”
I turned around to see what was wrong, and the man was completely terrified.
He was the one who had first said there might be cases of the living being buried early, and now look at him…
“No. How could that be possible? And if someone did die and come back, that would be a miracle. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”
“No… I mean, he’s not Jesus…”
“Exactly. What, did the Magi come to visit him when he was born?”
“N-no, of course not.”
If I pushed it any further here, it would count as blasphemy.
No matter how much science was advancing, this was still an era where almost no one denied religion itself.
That meant I had to be careful, and naturally there was one kind of joke that was one hundred percent safe and always landed in moments like this.
“Besides, Jémel was the one who killed him… Jémel’s French, not Jewish, isn’t he?”
“Ah, haha. Right. That’s true.”
What country did England hate most at the moment?
If I did not know, I just had to pick a nearby one.
In other words, France.
People always had trouble getting along with neighboring countries.
And besides, it was not that many decades ago that the two had been at war.
“So in other words, it’s impossible.”
“Mm.”
“Now move your hand. Why are you sweating so much?”
“Mm.”
After I cowed him with jokes like that, Alfred finally backed away.
Once the obstacle was removed, I opened the coffin lid.
“S-save me…”
There was the patient.
His face was pale, but he was clearly making expressions and speaking.
“He’s like this because he lost too much blood. Let’s get him to the hospital first.”
“You’re trying to kill me again!”
He seemed a little delirious too.
Or maybe not?
Was that actually the reasonable conclusion?
Good grief, with the hospital killing so many people, it was hard to infer anything from a reaction like that.
“No, no. Um… we’re not taking you to that man Jémel.”
“R-right. That’s… good. Hah…”
The moment I mentioned Jémel, the patient reacted as if he were about to faint on the spot.
Watching him breathe out like that, a question rose in my mind.
To be blunt, if it had no effect, could such an invasive treatment really have been passed down all this time?
It was a doctor’s curiosity.
At a glance, it was obviously a treatment that made no sense.
A headache was not caused by blood pooling there in the first place.
But still, they could not have kept forcing such a useless treatment for absolutely no reason.
They were still human, after all.
So I asked.
“But your head doesn’t hurt anymore now, does it?”
“H-hiiik. Don’t stab me.”
The moment I asked it, I knew I should not have.
The patient trembled violently, then—
“U-uaaah.”
—started convulsing.
“Um… sir?”
“Why would you ask that… to someone who was getting stabbed a moment ago because he said his head hurt…”
“Anyway… he’s still breathing. These convulsions are probably from the blood loss.”
“And how do you know that too?”
“Because I saw people die all the time back in Joseon.”
“Ah… right. I heard people get killed right out in the streets there.”
Forgive me, ancestors.
I lied a bit to stay alive, and after it all made the rounds, Joseon somehow turned into some kind of Mad Max country.
“Yes, yes.”
It did not seem like I could correct that now…
Once I made a lot of money later, I felt like I ought to send something to Joseon at least.
Of course, if I ever really did send something, I would have to think carefully about exactly who to send it to.
It was 1830, so…
It was probably King Sunjo’s reign.
The country was heading into decline, sure, but did that mean I should raise a rebel army?
Good grief.
Just thinking about it made my head hurt, so for now I moved toward the patient’s head in order to carry him back to the carriage.
Having moved quite a number of cadavers under Dr. Robert Liston’s orders, we were perfectly in sync when it came to this sort of thing.
Before I knew it, Alfred had already gone to the patient’s legs and lifted them.
“Um… is he really alive?”
The gravedigger came over to help, looking rather embarrassed.
He had clearly heard the plea for help and the screams too.
“I told you, didn’t I? He was about to be buried alive before he died.”
“Well now… then this…”
As the gravedigger helped us carry him back toward the carriage, he kept glancing behind him.
Then he looked at me and moved his lips slightly, as if he wanted to say something.
“What is it?”
“N-no, it’s nothing. Ha ha.”
But in the end, he never said it.
That left an unpleasant feeling.
A gravedigger looking back at the graves while staring at someone who had almost been buried alive.
It really made it seem as though there might be more people buried alive over there.
“Ugh…”
But the patient’s condition was too poor for us to go back to the graves again.
To begin with, this was a patient everyone had thought was already dead, so of course that was the case.
He had recovered a little strength for the moment, but if left like this, he would die again.
And then he really would end up back in that coffin and buried for real.
“Let’s go to the hospital.”
“Uh… no, what on earth is this…”
The coachman still had not managed to come very close.
He had wondered what the young masters were doing after going into the graveyard, and then we really came back out carrying a man.
And judging from how his clothes were covered in dirt, he had obviously just come back up from below.
And he was moving.
“Lord above.”
“Ah, do your praying later and get over here! We have to get to the hospital!”
“Hah.”
He had been staring up at the sky in pure, primal terror, and only after Alfred unusually shouted did he finally climb into his seat.
Even then, perhaps because his hands were still weak, the whipping lacked force, so we moved slowly.
We were crawling along a route that he ordinarily would have flown down.
In the end, that was both a good thing and a bad thing.
If we moved quickly, the carriage would shake more, which could hardly be good for the patient.
But there was nothing particularly good about going slowly either.
Or maybe not… even if we do go back to that hospital, what exactly can we do for him?
Anyway, since we were moving slowly now, I took the time to think carefully about what exactly needed to be done for the patient.
To start with, worrying about the cause of the headache seemed too far ahead.
If he had come all the way to the hospital, then since this was not twenty-first-century South Korea, he must really have suffered terribly before coming, so the cause was probably not something trivial—but that was not the immediate cause of death right now.
Blood… he lost a lot of blood.
It would be nice if a blood transfusion were possible.
But since coming here, I had never once seen a blood transfusion performed.
Do it myself?
There was no way to determine blood type.
It was not as if I had a microscope and could observe agglutination.
And there were no reagents to be found, even if I wanted to die looking for them.
Still, if I mixed the donor’s blood with this patient’s blood in advance, I could at least observe whether there was a reaction.
The problem is… that might be too high-tech.
Wouldn’t it?
If these experimental lunatics had known blood could be given, they would one hundred percent have tried it.
They surely would have done every absurd thing imaginable.
Animal blood, whatever else—who knew?
The fact that such atrocities did not seem to be happening meant either they did not know the method, or there was some reason they were not doing it.
Water… let’s at least give him water and buy some time. Fortunately, the patient is young. And even though he lost blood… that bastard was so incompetent he doesn’t seem to have hit any major vessel. I’ll have to look into transfusion slowly later.