“No,” I said gently. Then my resolve hardened. “But I can’t call him a man, either.”
“Nevertheless, a man he is,” Father argued. “A man carved and wrought from animal flesh. Don’t act so horrified, Juliet. It is merely surgery. You are no doubt familiar with some of the more common practices. Setting broken bones, amputations, stitching ruptured skin back together?”
“I am,” I answered cautiously.
“No one questions the hand of a doctor performing such procedures. No one calls it butchery—it is science, and no different from what transpires behind the door of my own laboratory. For it is surgery I perform. Grafting of skin, setting of bones. A more complex scale, mind you. There is a most fascinating procedure, you know, I have only recently perfected, wherein I separate the sternum . . .”
His explanations continued. Examples, details, complications of his work. They made my throat go dry and my mind whirl. He had really done it.
My father had played God and won.
I had so many questions, but the rush of them caught in my throat. How long did the grafting take to set? Why did he choose the human form? What did a heart split open and sewn back together look like? I shocked myself with my hunger to know.
Edward was strangely quiet, shocked by the horror of it, as I should have been. But as much as I knew I should be repulsed, my curiosity burned so brightly it made my humanity flicker and dim.
Father continued. “Balthasar, for example. He is part dog and part bear.” He traced an imaginary line along the bridge of Balthasar’s nose. “You can see the canine influence in his jaw placement, but examine these ears. Ursine.”
Montgomery’s figure filled the doorway, and my heartbeat sped. He knelt by the bookshelf with a hammer in hand. Thwack. Thwack. Each strike of his hammer made me cringe.
Thwack. Edward leaned forward, somehow able to ignore the hammering. “But what about scars?” Edward asked. “What about broken bones? Your creations don’t show any signs of surgery.”
“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.