The Executioner's Heart

CHAPTER 14

The girl-now a young woman-and her father were both taken aback by the sudden, crippling onset of her illness.

It struck suddenly one night in July, a terrible, excruciating pain in her chest. It felt as if someone were stabbing her repeatedly in the breast with a dagger. She howled and screamed, thrashing about violently beneath her bed sheets.

The inventor rushed into her room, panic etched on his face, and held her tightly while an ashen-faced neighbour sent for the doctor. He whispered reassuring words into her ear, promises that she would be safe, that he would protect her from whatever it was that was harming her.

Eventually, the pain abated and she was left panting raggedly for breath, covered in a thin sheen of sweat. The inventor laid her head softly upon the pillow, brushing her long, dark hair from her face, and held her hand while the doctor-an overweight, sour-breathed man close to his dotage-asked her a series of short, pointed questions. He put his head to her back and listened to the beating of her heart, examined her complexion, the whites of her eyes.

Then, muttering beneath his breath as if he cared not one jot about the girl, her father, or her likely prognosis, he declared that she had a weak heart, giving her no more than a few months to live. The inventor begged him to help her, to offer a means by which his adoptive daughter could be saved, but the doctor simply shrugged and explained that the condition was terminal and close to its end, and that there was nothing anyone could do. He took his payment and left, and with him went all hope of her salvation. The devil was close at hand, and was laughing at her as he waited to claim his prize.

The inventor wept through the night, and in the morning he sat her down and swore to her that he would find a means to vanquish her disease.

The only outward sign that there had been anything wrong was the fact that she had begun growing paler a few weeks before the attack. Nevertheless, once the doctor had offered up his diagnosis of a weakling heart, the inventor had blamed himself for not seeing it sooner. He told her he had thought the paleness nothing more than a sign of her burgeoning womanhood-she was now approaching nineteen years of age and becoming more beautiful with every passing day-but his experience with his wife should have enabled him to draw the right conclusion much earlier.

How unlucky it was that one man’s wife and adoptive daughter should both suffer in this way. He asked her one night if she thought he was cursed, and she smiled and offered him platitudes, all the while believing that perhaps, in truth, he was. What other explanation could there be?

Up until this point, her life with the inventor had been joyful and free of woe. He had lavished beautiful things upon her and had welcomed her wholeheartedly into his life. He had talked to her of his late wife, of her desire that she should grow to become just like her: a calm, joyful woman who thought of others before herself, who was deeply affronted by the injustices of the world, and who had been as beautiful in her heart as she had in the flesh.

The girl liked to think of the inventor and his wife sitting together in the drawing room of his great house. As a small child she imagined herself snuggling amongst the folds of her adoptive mother’s elaborate dresses (which still hung in a wardrobe upstairs at the house, and which she sometimes tried on when the inventor went out). She knew, though, that she could never be like this wonderful woman. She did not have it in her to be so selfless, so kind. She tried, of course, for his sake, but all the while she was aware of the evil in her heart, and reminded of the words of the old woman from the orphanage.

He told her how he had tried to save his dying wife, how he had worked tirelessly to find a means of sustaining her, of halting the progress of the sickness that consumed her, but had failed. He had run out of time and had not been able to complete his research. But that research would stand them both in good stead, now that she, too, was ill. He would return to his notebooks and journals, and in their still-crisp pages he would find the means to save her life.

She knew he kept these prized belongings in his study at the very centre of the house, but she was barely aware of the arcane things that went on in there. Indeed, she had rarely been allowed to enter the room, which bristled with the spines of leather-bound books, with vials and jars and silver candlesticks and things that even her wide-ranging imagination could barely conceive of. Animal skulls hung from threads attached to the ceiling, and the walls were daubed with strange, elaborate symbols. Clockwork machines ticked constantly, ominously, their tiny innards whirring. A marble slab filled the centre of the room, and the place had an unusual smell of incense, oil, musty books, and sweat about it.

In the days and weeks that followed her diagnosis, he locked himself away in that room for hours at a time, slaving over what he hoped would be a cure for her condition, a solution to all of their problems. When she pressed her ear to the door, she heard only the ticking of the clockwork machines, the occasional turn of a screw, and his laboured breath. She could not begin to imagine what form this cure might take.

The inventor would emerge from these long sessions with a red face and dripping brow, and she would go to him and hold him and thank him for all of his efforts on her behalf. She could see how tired he was, but also how driven. She rarely saw him at all during those strange, wild days and nights. Yet he appeared to appreciate these moments of kindness and affection, reminding her that whatever happened, whatever he had to sacrifice, he would not give up on his daughter.

And so when the attacks came with increasing regularity she tried her best to be strong, and not to think of those fork-tongued demons awaiting her with their tridents and lascivious eyes.

* * *

Almost two months passed. The girl became weaker still, and took to her bed, no longer able to manage even the small activities of daily life. The stairs were now a mountain to her, the walk to the privy a mile-long excursion.

That was when the inventor finally emerged, triumphant, from his study. He burst into her room unannounced, his eyes wild with success. She remembered feeling not joy, but fear at his wild, frenetic manner. He was trembling as he took her hand, squeezed it, and told her how he had finally found the answer to their prayers. He would mend her broken heart, and she would never have to leave him.

Her relief was palpable. She thanked him profusely for everything he had done and told him that, had he not come to the orphanage that day over ten years earlier and whisked her away from that dreadful place, she would already be dead. He had given her life simply by offering her a place in the world.

He wept tears of relief. Then, anxious not to risk even a moment longer to the vagaries of the damaged organ in her breast, he scooped her up and carried her down the stairs to his study.

She remembered how the smoke stung her eyes, how the marble slab was cold and harsh beneath her shoulders as he laid her out before him. Books were propped open on wooden lecterns all around him, and a gleaming object, forged from brass, rested upon his workbench.

She told him she was scared. He smiled warmly and assured her that she need not fear anything. The procedure would take some time. In the meantime, he would help her sleep. That way, her pretty face would not have to be blemished by any pain she might suffer as he carried out his operation.

She trusted him without question, so she willingly acceded to his wishes, deeply inhaling the fumes of the foul-smelling chemical he presented to her on a rag. Her mind swirled, and soon the dizziness overcame her, sending her spiralling into a deep slumber.

She dreamed of devils and demons, of searing flames and eternal damnation. It was five days before she woke.

She recalled how she struggled to sit up in her bed, the curious sense that her body felt somehow different, awkward and ungainly. She felt the weight of something pressing on her left shoulder. In the darkened room, she imagined it to be a bandage strapped tightly across her chest.

Whatever her father had done for her had worked. She could sense her body was already stronger, flushed with vibrancy and life. He had fulfilled his promises and saved her from the demons that were slowly eroding her heart.

Hesitantly, she swung her legs out over the side of the bed and climbed unsteadily to her feet. She fumbled for a candle and lit it from the dying embers of the fire that still glowed faintly in the grate. She carried the candle to the looking glass so that she might examine his work; see how the colour had returned to her cheeks.

At first the sight of the stranger that confronted her baffled her. Had she been confused and inadvertently gone to the window instead? Who was this demonic woman who glowered at her in confusion?

Then realisation had dawned on her and she screamed. The sound that erupted from her throat was like none she had heard before. What had he done?

The woman staring back at her from the looking glass was covered in the same elaborate symbols as the walls in the inventor’s study: circles and whorls, pentagrams and stars, runes and words. They covered her entirely from head to toe. Not an inch of her still-pale flesh remained untouched.

She tried rubbing at the strange marks, wiping them away, but they refused to be scrubbed clean. They were etched deep into her flesh, as much a part of her now as the tiny blemishes and imperfections that she’d noted as a child. Furthermore, nestled amongst the ink-black tattoos were traceries of precious metals: silver, platinum, and gold. They shimmered in the reflected candlelight, highlighting particular symbols or runes like accents on particular words.

Worst of all, the tightness she had felt across her shoulder was not, as she had thought, a tightly bound bandage, but the brass instrument she had seen on the workbench in the inventor’s study. It was a brace that fit over her shoulder like a sword guard. She could feel the mechanisms inside it slowly turning, hear the gurgling rush of fluid as her blood passed through the metal chambers inside. A tiny key jutted from a hole in its surface-a winding mechanism, she realised, with which to operate it. This was her new heart, the clockwork engine that would beat in place of her own.

On the front of the device, filling the space where her left breast had once been, was a glass panel like the porthole on a ship. Inside she could see the shrivelled remains of her own damaged organ, now black and necrotic and fused to her new, unnatural components.

She wanted to turn and run from her horrific image, to pretend that she was still dreaming, that the living hell she had glimpsed in the mirror was just another trial, another imaginary torment placed before her by the demons and the old woman. But she now knew the true nature of her damnation. She had been saved from the clutches of the devil by the ministrations of the inventor, but the devil had found a means to punish her regardless: The fallen one had worked through her father, imbuing him with dark intent and the occult powers with which to afflict her.

Something broke inside of her, then. A cold numbness seemed to spread outwards from the void in her chest until it utterly engulfed her. She had lost her heart, and from that day onwards, she would never feel anything again.