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.