Sex at SIXTY

 

The blend of classics into one..... April 2025 ..... HUGE BANG soon

 The dates spanned from the mid-14th century to the 15th century....

• End of the Hundred Years' War (1453):

  The long conflict between England and France, which had been ongoing for over a century, concluded with the English defeat at the Battle of Castillon, marking a significant turning point in European history.
• Fall of Constantinople (1453):

  The Ottoman Empire, under Sultan Mehmed II, conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the Ottoman Empire as a major power.
• Wars of the Roses (1455-1487):

  A dynastic conflict in England between the House of Lancaster and the House of York, fought over the English throne, began in 1455 and lasted for over three decades.
• Other notable events:

  • 1439: Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press, revolutionizing the spread of knowledge and information.
  • 1469: Marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, uniting the kingdoms of Spain.

  Boring... Perhaps to some, but to me, it was to explore further in, and I found the HUGE BANG (the Big Bang was taken up then ..... hence my definitive mark here); the works of the classics were said to be of that era.

I was referring to three classics: MERCHANT OF VENICE, ROMEO AND JULIET, and DRACULA. Historically, to be in the same dates era, and one bloody ... excuse my expletive; the porn sites were unappealing.... I explored DRACULA... and did his works some months back... I meant writing about his exploits. It gave me more reasons to feel my neck during dawn.... and heck, my bride remains the same as it was thirty years ago. 

I then wandered off to VENICE and found another bloody event, minus the blood content, and CUPID struck me on the groin; he does miss at times, and I came to read ROMEO (thought then someone called me) and JULIET (she took the fast train to RENO when I was on PADDINGTON). 

Evil thoughts came to me.

If I can blend them and make a new recipe, what of blood and love, and money lenders...how interesting...okay, okay, sex is included in the package there...why not? We are all adults here, I presume. 

Imagine when David Livingstone was asked the now famous words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" 

And if Livingstone was to respond, "No," and then, "I think they ate him..... Sorry, guvnor. Wrong continent, that one." 

"Thankfully, may I get out of the pot now, please? I think they added too much salt to the soup." 

Sarcasm works well most times.

Anyhow, I crossed my legs and covered my neck. I am taking the voyage to do that... and after three days of stormy weather, I am at 25K words... time flies when you are dying to tell the tale. My new tale will be different as it will start to explain a few matters we were never told, like why the Montagues and Capulets never liked each other but their children did, who Shylock was before he was the flesh-hungry money lender, and Vlad II (I absolutely loved him); his life once more told in words of how he had lived then. 

Those are the ingredients, and moving time and space into one frame, you get a refreshing look at how they knew each other and love binds us, while families destroy it.

Nuff said..... the HUGE BANG is coming. 

Preys and Predator Part II; the monster and witches' Chapter 6

 

6

Henry arrived at the creek and saw Sven was attending to someone near the overturned carriage. There was one other person standing nearby, an elderly lady holding her left arm close to her chest. He rushed over towards Sven.

“Help me with her.” Sven told the younger man. “Hold her gently. She may be hurt on the back.”

Sven held out his arms to assist the injured figure, a young lady with the bonnet still on her head. He had helped Sven before with the farm creatures in need of aid, like the mare when she gave birth to the foal. They lifted the lady to the wagon and gently placed her there.

“May I know where you are taking her?” The elderly lady asked. “She is …”

“To our home. I have sent Parker to get the doctor.” Sven replied. Parker was the one who told Sven about the accident.

“Oh, that poor man. He was by the road when the wheel came off, and we crashed to the side. I hope he is well.”

“He is, my lady. So will she be soon. I am taking her to the home. We have some doctors there.” Sven had directed Henry to pull the horse then.

“Please be gentle with her. And... she disliked noises and prayers. She is rather special.” The elderly lady called out. “I will follow behind soon after…”

“Come along, lady. We have a chamber for you on the wagon.” Sven cleared a space for the elderly lady. “No reason to walk yourself.”

“My …” The elderly lady looked to the carriage.

“Do not worry about the carriage or your belongings. The road is without any strangers. No one will touch your belongings.”

The journey to the mansion was short, and then the injured lady was moved to the spare chamber near the kitchen. The maids were the ones to assist in the moving. Sven went to look for the owner of the mansion.

“Sire,” Sven was careful to address the Общий by the salutations they agreed on when it was not private. “There was an accident at the creek. A carriage overturned, and a lady was hurt. She is in the spare chamber at the left wing.”

“Called the doctor then. The village is not far.” The elderly man seated in front of the fireplace looked towards Sven. “Need I be bothered with such matters?”

“No, Sire. I thought the … either one of the boys with knowledge of the ... body may attend to the lady on her injuries. As the initial checks before the doctor arrives.”

“They are ... biologists, not medical doctors, Sven.” The elderly man looked back to the fireplace. “Do not involve them. And Spielsdorf arrives today. Be discreet, please, there.”

It was said, but the one who attended was the lady who was the tenant there. Justine was returning the morning breakfast tray when she came across the rushing maids from the chamber.

“Good day, Ms. Moritz.” The maid, Emily, was rushing out with the bowl of water, shaded dark brown.

“Was there an accident among the staff?’ Justine asked. “Can I help?”

“No, Ms. Moritz. The staff are fine. It is someone brought in by Sven. Was injured in an accident at the creek. We are just trying to clean her wounds while Doctor Mitchell has been summoned.”

Justine went into the chamber, and being a lady, she was allowed in. The men were all shooed out to wait outside. She saw Maple and Elaine; the two other maids had opened the bodice of the injured lady. The bonnet was removed. An elderly lady was tended to by the kitchen cook, Mary Louise, by the seat near the window. The drapes were pulled shut over the window.

“Be careful with her, please.” The elderly lady called out. The maids were dabbing the wet cloth over the injured lady’s chest when Justine stepped over.

“May I please?” Justine examined the lady’s wounds. There were some bruises but no open cuts on the chest. She helped to push the cloth aside to look at the ribs when her hands were grabbed by the injured lady. It was a tight grip and caused her to pull back.

“Arghh….” Justine pulled her hands back, but the grip was still there. “Please …”

“Carmilla, please ……” The elderly lady called out.

“Nobody touches me!” The injured lady called Carmilla shrieked out. “I …”

“Carmilla! Behave now.” The elderly lady pushed herself towards the bedding. “Behave.”

“I …” Carmilla loosened her grip, and Justine pulled back. She looked at her wrists; they were bruised.

“No sunlight…” Carmilla spoke out while her arms covered her eyes. “No sun…”

“The sunlight is covered. You are ……. Were hurt. They are trying to help.” The elderly lady approached Carmilla. “You will be …”

“I am fine. I will be fine.” Carmilla stared at the elderly lady. “You know of it.”

“Yes … You will be fine.” The elderly lady spoke out in a calm voice. She pushed the maids away and tended to Carmilla. She pulled the bodice closed and then patted Carmilla on the cheek. Justine had then stepped aside and nursed her wrists.

“Are you okay, Ms. Moritz?” It was Emily who stood next to the lady. “Do you want a hot towel?”

“No, Emily. I am fine.” Justine shook her head. She had studied bruises as part of her studies. From her knowledge, a force of around one point five to two times the body weight applied to a small area can often lead to bruising, though lighter impacts can also cause it. The lady, Carmilla, does not look to be a heavy lady.

Bruising due to abusive squeezing also forms along lines of greatest anatomical stress, resulting in a negative imprint of the flexural folds of the hand. That could be it, but again, what was causing Carmilla such stress?

Justine’s thoughts flitted back to when she was younger, back home in Belgium.

“Waterduivels!”

The call went out. It literally means ‘water devil,’ and it’s used both to refer to a specific creature of mythical aquatic monster nature. The waterduivels that supposedly live in the river Maas; the creatures held the humanoid frame with black skin and horns protruding from their heads. Their faces were adorned with curved, wicked tusks, and their large eyes were glowing like burning coals, perhaps the influence of the image of the Devil, but these creatures dwell in the flaming labyrinth.

Some tales said they wielded large, curved metal hooks, which they used to pull people under the water if someone peeked into a well. Somewhere they may incarnate into cats; the victim found themselves being followed by a large herd of cats. One myth was of a beautiful girl named Marieke. She was the lover of a young and handsome bard named Claes. He adored the bard, and one day at the quay next to her house, a wicked waterduivel asked the lady for her wish. She longed to see her lover again.

The waterduivel told her to go to the edge of the water at exactly midnight, for Claes would be there. She did as she was told. At the stroke of midnight, the waterduivel climbed on land and sucked all the blood and the very life force out of her body before disappearing beneath the waves. Claes found her there the next morning, and his heart immediately ceased beating. He fell on top of her, locked in a kiss from which neither of them would ever get up.

There was the creek. Water was there. It was then Justine felt the rush of coldness in her spine.

 

 

Preys and Predator Part II; the monster and witches' Chapter 5

 

5

Victor attached the electrical nodes to the dog that he brought back from the uni. It was a stray there and was taken care of by the staff, feeding it with their leftovers. The dog in turn patrolled the grounds, chasing or scaring off any intruders. There were times before when the library was ransacked, but no one bothered since then. The incident did not warrant a mention in the local news prints.

Victor was intensely working the nodes to the paws of the dog that he had earlier sedated with the meat he fed it. He was trying to do further work by Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician and physicist who investigated the nature and effects of what he conceived to be electricity in animal tissue. It was later challenged by another named Volta, who did similar findings without electricity: contractions by connecting, through a bimetallic arc, two points of the same nerve without any contact with muscle. The two had sent contradictory findings to refute each other.

Other findings on the nervous system did not concur. One finding read in Treatise on Man, written between 1629 and 1633 and then published in 1664, continued to speak of the place for animal spirits to roam throughout the body; the nerves are nothing else but productions of the marrow and slimy substance of the brain, through which the animal spirits do rather beam than are transported. And this substance is indeed more fit for irradiation than a conspicuous or open cavity, which would have made our motions and sensations more sudden, commutative, violent, and disturbed, whereas now the members receiving a gentle and successive illumination are better commanded by our will and moderated by our reason.

As anyone keen on finding the truth, it was to conduct experiments.

Victor had done that with the cadaver’s parts and found no response. He had tried on several parts, and in conclusion, he felt that the dead was truly dead to any effect. He once tried by attaching the nodes to his arm and felt the most excruciating pain then.

Then it was to redo the experiment on the sedated dog.

Victor lowered the voltage, an error he managed to rectify from his own pain. The current surge was kept to the minimum.

“Henry, are we ready?” Victor looked to his co-conspirator, who was holding the dough on the table.

“You need not hold the dog.” Victor looked at Henry Clerval, the assistant of Sven, to work on the stables and the grounds. Henry was adopted by Sven when he found the boy at the estate. He was underfed and dressed in tatters. Sven took the boy to refuge with him and then introduced him to work there. He was always playing with Victor and William; the latter tend to take advantage of the smaller boy.

“He may jump like the cat.” Henry said. The previous experiment with the maid’s cat was blemished by the higher voltage, and the creature was not sedated. When the experiment was underway, it created mayhem in the lab, and unfortunately, the cat died. It was buried at the rear of the lab, in the unmarked grave, and Henry was sworn to secrecy on that. Morgan the cat was mourned for a day or two by the maids and soon forgotten. The mice did celebrate the event, though.

“It is okay, Henry. The dog is sleeping. It will not jump.” Victor explained. “Now remove your hands from the dog, or you will feel pain like I did the last time.”

It was Henry who saved Victor from the electricity jolts when he powered down the generator then. Victor collapsed on the flooring, and after much concern from Henry, he was relieved.

“I am doing it now.” Victor cautioned the other and threw the switch on. He saw the dog twitch in the eyes, and then when he increased the voltage, the creature started twitching in the limbs.

“Stop, please.” Henry pleaded towards Victor. “He is hurting.”

The dog was still sedated, but tears appeared at its eyes, and the mucus slipped at the snout. Victor threw the switch and then approached the dog. It was breathing shallow but unmoving on the limbs.

“Is it dead?” Henry asked.

“No. It is alive.” Victor examined the front paws. There were some dark markings, but the flesh was intact. He was unsure of the results. He had done it on the cadavers, and nothing was seen. There was no twitching at all.

“It cannot be. The dog holds the nerves like we do, and yet it moved, but not the cadavers.” Victor spoke to himself. “Why?”

“I think the dog is bleeding.” Henry raised the left ear of the dog. There were traces of blood there. “Did we kill it too?”

“No…… I am unsure.” Victor looked at the shallow breaths of the dog. “It is breathing.”

“Could it be that? The blood in us. The blood allowed us to … communicate.” Victor was rushing to the desk with all the volumes. “Blood is the … link?”

“Victor, I think I need to go now. Sven is calling for me. We were to do the stables today.” Henry did not wait for the reply and took off. Victor stood there and looked at the notes that he had written.

“Nothing of it makes sense. He had examined the nerves, the bones with the joint structures, and the…”

“The brain.” Victor called out. “It is what differs in us.”

Victor grabbed the saw at the wall. He approached the dog and did the incision to remove the brain. He sawed the scalp and then removed the cut portion. He saw the throbbing brain and the blood that flowed out.

“Blood…” Victor shook his head. “I’ve done it many times.”

Victor had pumped blood into the cadaver parts and tried to reanimate it, but it did not work. The parts did not absorb the blood, and it all seeped out.

“It is dead. It cannot get the blood in. Nothing flows inside of it.” Victor sighed. “What was the missing link?”

Victor looked to the cold chamber where he keeps his collection of body parts. Inside there was his prized specimen; the body parts that he intended to reattach for the body and only left was the brain and part of the torso. He had matched the dimensions to ensure perfection.

Was it?

The body was also dead without the blood inside.

“I must find the link.” Victor's tears welled up in his eyes. “I must do it.”

“Henry, bring the wagon. We have an incident by the creek.” Sven was there holding the horse to attach it to the wagon. Hurry up, boy. We do not have a full day.”

“Do it. I am going to the creek.” Sven took off.

Henry rushed into the stable and pulled the horse out. It was hitched on, and he then led the horse with the wagon. He glanced back at the lab when he passed by it. It was quiet in there.

“Goodbye, doggie.” Victor toom the carcass and tossed it into the furnace he had installed there at the corner. He used the lab to destroy the unneeded body parts. The furnace consisted of cast-iron or riveted-steel heat exchangers built within an outer shell of brick, masonry, or steel. The furnace also served as heat exchangers; vented through brick or masonry chimneys. Air circulation depended on large, upwardly pitched pipes constructed of wood or metal.

Inside the lab, Victor was studying the brain. He prods at it with the needle and watches the blood that seeps out. The microscope was his view of the nerves there. He had the latest model of the microscope designed then. The earlier models were able to magnify the image, but it suffered from what was termed as aberration at the lens: spherical and chromatic aberration. It was recently that the correction was done by Joseph Jackson Lister and William Tulley.

Spherical aberration resulted in a partially blurred image caused by light passing through different areas of the lens. The parts of the image focusing at a different distance between the lens and the eye of the observer may not be clear or out of focus. It was solved by using a certain combination of lenses, one correcting the aberration of the other. The second was the chromatic aberration. This problem results from the fact that the wavelengths of different colors refract to differing degrees, so blue will focus closer to the lens than red. That was corrected, and what was seen was the true shades.

“Nothing unusual there.” Victor adjusted the lens. He was dissatisfied with the results. “It looks the same.”

“How could I be missing the essential here?” Victor was mumbling to himself. During any war then, the wounds inflicted on the limbs were deadly, and if the life of the soldier was to be saved, it was the removal of the affected limb. It was called amputation; over the course of the American Civil War, three out of four surgeries were amputations. Amputations were one of the quickest, most effective ways for surgeons to treat as many patients as possible in a short amount of time; the loss of the limb saved their lives.

When amputation was necessary, the procedure was sophisticated, and like most surgical procedures over the course of the war, it was conducted with patients under anaesthesia in the form of either chloroform or ether; in some cases, the bottle of whiskey was administered. The limb was tightened around the limb to reduce bleeding. when the damaged limb was removed.   The surgeon could do the work depending on the wound. It may be a circular or flap amputation procedure. The former cut through the skin, muscle, and bone all at the same point on the limb, creating an open wound at the stump that healed on its own. The latter was to get the skin from the amputated limb to cover the stump, closing the wound. A scalpel was used to cut through the skin and a Caitlin knife to cut through the muscle. The surgeon then picked up a bone saw to cut the bone until it was severed. The limb was then discarded, and the surgeon tied off the arteries with either horsehair, silk, cotton, or metal threads. The surgeon then scraped the edges of the bone smooth so that they would be forced to work back through the skin before it was sewn close. The surgeon then moved to the next surgery.

Victor was trying to improvise on the procedure to restore the limb.

It was not to work.

Like a structure without its use.