“I was just six years old when I discovered my fondness for evisceration. I was sitting in the garden of a gamekeeper’s lodge on the grounds of Blackstone Manor my father rented for the summer: an old cottage with overgrown ivy covering much of its fascia. A floral arch rose over the front door porch, which itself was a paean to a glory long lost to antiquity: large, solid heavy wood, probably oak, with brass furniture, and gloss black paint. There was no number to identify it to passing posties, or servers of writs, but that was unnecessary, for the nearest neighbour was a mile away along the long, straight, low hedged lane crossing the Norfolk fens. To me, the double front looked like the face of a kindly old woman, the upper windows were her eyes, the small mezzanine window above the stair landing was her nose, and the door her mouth set in a permanent expression of surprise. The thatched roof added to the impression, especially with a stork’s nest nestled above the central chimney. I’m told white storks haven’t nested in England for six hundred years, and I’ve seen no inhabitants, so it must be ancient, perhaps the one Sir Thomas Browne described in the drawing he sent to the naturalist Francis Willughby. Browne, like my father, summered at Blackstone, although he rented the main house, not our humble cottage. The ruins of Blackstone Manor were at least a mile and a half away over table-flat fields, but even sat behind tall privet hedges I could see the old clock tower rising into the sky. It must have been magnificent in those years before the fire in the early eighteenth century.
The rear of the cottage was not as picturesque, a plain white wall showing the outlines of the brickwork, a single thin door leading to the kitchen, a coalhouse forming a narrow buttress to the cottage’s northern edge and four sash windows. And it was one of these that led to my lifelong interest in the ticking clocks of viscera.
Two house martins were swooping across the flower beds, dodging each other playfully. One of them, for no apparent reason, flew straight at the upper floor window, crashing into it with a dull thud. It fell to the floor, and I rose from the sandpit my father built to entertain me, crossed the small flagstone yard circumscribing the house from the garden proper, and stood over it. Its eyes were still open, but even six-year-old me could see it had broken its neck, such was the force it struck the pane. I stared at it for some time, wishing life back into it, but it refused to move, even after I prodded it with my sandal. So, I plucked a napkin from the clothesline, wrapped it carefully, and hid it in the coal shed. After hiding it, I returned to my sandcastle building only when I was satisfied that no one had seen me.
Despite my play at building, my mind remained focused on the cooling body I hid, and a growing fascination with the workings of this guest of summer dominated my thoughts. If I could only find the mechanism by which it flew, perhaps I could fly, too.
It was not until late that night, when my parents were bedded and shaking the house with their loud snores, that I dared creep down to the kitchen with my torch, secure a paring knife and steal away to the coal house. There, I unwrapped the now stiff carcass of the martin and lay it, wings-spread, on the cold, stone floor. My first incision was a ragged affair. My hand was shaking with excitement, and the blade did not seem man enough for the task. It pierced but refused to slice the bird’s breast. Several chopping cuts later, the reason became apparent. It was the first time I had seen bones inside the body of an animal. Previous experiences: pork chops, Sunday joints, and dog mauled ends and scraps seemed divorced from the life they once knew, but this was an entirely different level of discovery. Bones in situ seemed to convey a wisdom of the mechanics of life, even in death.
My knife plunged deeper, and I pulled the bird’s viscera from its tiny body. Now dead, they did not impart any sense of their function. They were just lumps of stringy meat. It was only much later that I would discover the Hermetic Qabalah assignment of planets for the organs, and so complete my theory of sacrifice to appease those ancient gods.
Despite my interest in physiology, I never wanted to study it in an academic sense. It was more of a calling, an almost religious belief in my duty to offer the fineries of internal dressings to the whirling deities of the solar system. So, I did not follow my grandfather into medicine, nor, for that matter, my father into the dull processing of numbers. My hobby left a trail of eviscerated small animals: cats, mice, rats, even dogs, across the Norfolk countryside. A local newspaper referred to me as the “Fens Slasher”, after a distraught woman sent them pictures of her much-divided Tibbles. No, I went into geology, and that, dear Anthea, is what brought the two of us to this interesting situation, far away from any civilised outpost.”
She screamed as I withdrew my scalpel from the pouch on my belt. A much more vivid yell than the one she uttered when she broke her leg in the fall from the escarpment we were traversing. Of course, she was unconscious soon after her fall, and I, seeing a chance to explore my interests further, bound her securely while she was in a dazed state.
Stepping forward, I raised my scalpel. She screamed again, and I wondered if gagging her might aid my concentration, but the screams fed my beast, so I let her vent.
I went to work, and my sighs turned to gasps as my blade revealed her inner workings.
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