“A happy accident of my banishment. The island’s isolation means there is almost no disease here. A body can heal in a matter of days if there is no risk of infection. Quite remarkable. I daresay many of my attempts in London failed solely from the polluted city air.” He drew in a lungful to prove his point.
Thwack. The nail drove deeper, as if Montgomery was driving it into my very heart. How hard was it to fix a loose nail? He hit it again and again, determined to set that bookshelf straight. Determined to do something right, after so much wrong.
I pressed the heel of my hand to the aching space between my ribs.
“But what about the pain?” I whispered. Balthasar’s grin faded. From the corner of my eye, I saw the hammer pause in Montgomery’s hand.
Father scoffed and took another sip of tea. “Pain is merely a signal to the brain. Like the urge to sneeze. Uncomfortable, but tolerable.”
I swallowed down something hard and bitter. “You use anesthesia, right?”
“Can’t. It interferes with the vivisection. Causes the body to reject new material. Anyway, animals are used to pain. It’s a formative part of their lives. Birth of offspring, fighting over prey, competing for a mate. In fact, pain can be an effective tool. When I am finished with them, they are abnormally docile creatures, through no intention of my own. The pain drives the fight out of them, you see.”
Montgomery slammed the hammer against the nail one final time, hard enough to crack the wood. A shiver raced up my spine, punctuating the horror of what Father was saying. He tortured these beasts with as little disregard for their well-being as if they were straw dummies. I narrowed my eyes, wondering if Father would feel any differently if it was a human instead of an animal on his table.
I wasn’t sure he would.
Montgomery thrust the hammer into his back pocket. I caught sight of Alice in the doorway. She must have been there long enough to hear at least a little, because her face was white. Montgomery took her hand and led her away.
“What is your intention in all this, Doctor?” Edward asked, with a surprisingly steady voice.
Father folded his hands. “I am in pursuit of the ideal living form. Just like all of us, wouldn’t you say? The same reason we choose mates and procreate. We want to create something better than ourselves. Perfection. To me, perfection is a being with the reason of man but the natural innocence of children—or animals. I have come so close to achieving it. You have no idea how close. I thought, once . . .” His black eyes gleamed at Edward. “Well, it failed in the end, as they all have failed. It wasn’t always humans I tried to create. I started with smaller things. Rats. Birds. Just tweaking their shape, minor alterations. But I wasn’t satisfied. I kept creating, kept carving flesh. I’ve yet to attain perfection.” He sighed deeply, then waved a hand in Balthasar’s general direction. “Montgomery tends to them—these failures. Teaches them English, basic skills, trains the more intelligent ones to work for us here in the compound. Administers their treatments.”
“Treatments?” I asked.
Father held his cup for Balthasar to pour more tea. A drip spilled onto his linen pants, and he waved Balthasar away, annoyed. “Yes, treatments,” he said absently, dabbing at the drip with a napkin. “We give them a serum to keep the tissue from rejecting its new form. Without it they revert to their original state. It’s another fail-safe, you see. If anything goes wrong, we stop their treatments, and they return to being cows and sheep and whatever other harmless animals they came from.”
“But they’re amalgamations,” I said. “You stitch together different animals.”
He shrugged. “Then I suppose they would regress into strange-looking cows and sheep perhaps, but harmless nonetheless.” He took a sip, and then thrust the cup angrily into Balthasar’s hands. “The tea’s gone cold.”
Balthasar stared at the sloshing tea, uncertain what was to be done with it. I folded my hands around his, taking the cup gently.
“I’ll take care of the tea,” I said, biting my words. I hurled the cup into the fireplace, where it shattered in a thousand white pieces that littered the floor like snowfall.
Edward leapt up in surprise, but Father didn’t flinch.
Balthasar trembled. I laid my hand on the unnatural hump of his shoulder. “Don’t listen to him, Balthasar,” I said. “You’re not the monster here.” I gave Father a cold glare and stormed into the courtyard.
Twenty-six
I STOPPED TO STEADY myself on the water pump. In the garden Cymbeline calmly dropped peas into a wicker basket, just another normal day. All traces of the snarling little creature from the village were gone. He sang a strange song, though the tune seemed familiar. The melody slowly took shape until I could hum it, the words gradually returning. “Winter’s Tale.” A lullaby Mother used to sing to me. Sung now on the lips of this poor animal carved into a little boy by a madman.
I dashed into the barn. I needed a place to hide from the world. Chaff filtered through the air like dancing sunlight. I collapsed on a bale of fresh straw, pain gripping me somewhere deep. I buried my hands in my hair. The shame. The rumors. The whispers. Just like I was still eight years old. Only now I knew.
My father was a monster. And a genius.
Mother’s voice whispered, telling me everything he was doing was against God, against nature. And yet a small but sharp part of me, like a piece of broken glass lodged in my heart, was almost proud of him. I knew that was wrong. But he was part of who I was—how could I not feel that way?