Sherman stepped in the way of Palmer’s pacing, necessitating he stop. “Take my advice, young man. Return to your flat. Rest. Alleviate this worry from your mind.”
“It is not a ‘worry.’ It is a scientific mystery. I cannot merely abandon this pursuit.”
“I fear if you continue, it will drive you mad,” Dr. Sherman said.
“If I do not find the answers I need, it most certainly will.”
Dr. Sherman watched him for a long moment, brows drawn in concern, as if Palmer was unaware of the dire nature of his own condition. Palmer did not flinch under the pointed gaze. He knew Sherman was mistaken; pursuing these answers wasnotan ill-conceived quest. It had become his life’s mission.
A sigh emitted from the older doctor. “Blackstone still oversees the dissection room. Perhaps he will have some familiarity with the manifestation you speak of.”
Realizing his one-time idol did not intend to offer much else in the way of help, Palmer left without a backward glance. The struggle for knowledge abides no sentimental loyalties.
He knew perfectly well how to find the dissecting room. He might have been struggling to find answers to difficult questions, but he was not struggling with his memory.Blackstone’s office, located directly beside the room where the cadavers were kept, was empty, its usual living occupant apparently occupied elsewhere.
Irritated with the ceaseless obstacles he encountered, Palmer made his way into the dissecting room without waiting for its overseer to grant permission. The room was dark. No candles or lanterns were lit. The windows were covered in thick draperies. The odor of the room was not one any medical student ever forgot nor truly grew accustomed to. Palmer refused to be felled by olfactory discomfort.
He closed the door behind him, extinguishing every bit of light in the room, though there’d been precious little to begin with. Though he could see nothing, he knew what lay before him—a half-dozen tables with cadavers laid atop them, awaiting examination. Another encounter in this room that students struggled to not find disconcerting.
Palmer inched his way along the wall on which the door hung and placed himself in the corner, and waited. Waited for lights to appear. Waited for the rumors he’d heard to prove themselves true.
“Light up,” he whispered in short bursts of breath. “Light up.”
The room remained dark. Minutes ticked by. Perhaps hours. Still, he remained in his corner, watching, whispering, waiting.
And then ... the lights came.
The subjects upon the tables became quite unexpectedly lit by a remarkably luminous appearance, emanating, as it would seem, from the cadavers themselves. They were lit to such a degree that their forms and shapes and variousparts were as clear to see as if every lantern in the school had been lit and brought into the dissecting room, as if the heavy curtains had been pulled back and sunlight allowed to stream inside.
Palmer made mental notes of all he saw, memorizing the details, taking in every possible aspect. The whispers he’d heard were showing themselves to be true.
He would be vindicated. He would be listened to at last.
He stepped out of the dissecting room, searching out someone to act as witness to the phenomenon. Dr. Sherman and Dr. Blackstone were emerging from the latter’s office. Neither seemed overly surprised to see him, but they also did not look overly pleased.
“It is happening just as I said it would,” Palmer announced. “They are glowing in precisely the way I’ve seen others. You doubted, but it is happening. It is happening now.”
With looks of doubt, they followed him through the dissecting room doors once more. Soon enough, their disbelief would be turned to apology.
Again, the smell of the room rushed over Palmer. Again, he dismissed it. He pushed the door closed, plunging the room into the darkness necessary to see the glow.
But the glow was gone.
Utterly gone.
“It was happening,” he growled out. “It was.”
He could not see his colleagues, but he knew they would be considering him with equal parts pity and annoyance. He knew because that had become the near-constant response he received to his declarations.
“I am not lying, and I am not mad,” he insisted. “I saw what I saw.”
“Perhaps, Palmer, you should take a bit of time away,” Dr. Sherman said. “Find a quiet corner of the country and rest your mind.”
“I have not gone mad. And, somehow, I will prove it.”
With that proclamation, he stormed out. He knew now that bodies could glow after death, and he knew of one other means of observing the recently deceased.
He needed to find a Resurrection Man.