The Murder in the Laboratory
To read from the beginning, go here.
I completed my journey over the sedative border between awake and near death without being truly aware of it. I was sitting at the table, tucking into a rather fine duck breast, then I was in the dark, laying on my side with my legs bunched close to my chest, the dim light of the dining hall replaced with total darkness. Slowly I became aware of the hardness of the cauldron around me. I shook my head, trying to gain full consciousness. As I did so, I realized that I was naked, the cold iron of the large pot I had been put into pressing into my skin, the ropes I was bound by dug into my flesh. I struggled against my bonds. In the darkness I couldn’t see if the razor still remained adhered to the underside of the pot’s lip.
This rising uncertainty caused my breath to quicken, pushing harshly through my nose and past the gag in my mouth. I knew the cauldron’s dimensions, but in that moment it was both the smallest of prisons and inescapable as the galaxy, the stars forming behind my eyes giving testament to the darkness I was trapped in.
This was only eclipsed by Uncle Daman’s pallid face rising above the lip of the cauldron. Lit by a ghastly light, he spoke quietly and near tenderly. “This is meaningless now, my dear boy, but I did want to tell you that I’m sorry it came to this. I did my best to find a suitable replacement, but as you saw, even at its most successful with Jakob I could only maintain the transference for a short period of time.
“I’ve enjoyed you in every way and would have preferred to continue that in my new form. But alas, had I not killed your parents to arrange your move here, we would never have met.”
The admission of my parents’ murder opened up something in me, both hidden and ineluctable, and I felt unbidden tears begin to roll down my face. I had suspected this truth on a level so deep that I had not admitted it to myself until Daman’s words pulled it up from my soul, leaving me to observe the wreckage of my life that he had wrought. With the ghosts of my parents and innocent Jakob sitting upon that ruin, my tears became the uncontrollable sobbing of a child.
Observing my lamentations, Daman leaned closer, wiping tears from my cheek. In what was most likely the closest his damned soul could ever come to true sympathy, he smiled sweetly and said, “I knew you were a good boy from the beginning, Cole. And this is the reward of all good boys.”
This pushed a new surge of tears upon me, cheeks puffing as I tried to breath past them and the gag. It was only then that I noticed the peculiar greenish cast to the light on Daman’s face. I realized the braziers had been lit. This small thing and knowing what it meant halted my crying and replaced it with a calm. I relaxed against the bottom of the cauldron, knowing it was now the safest place as the entirety of the laboratory filled with my gaseous poison.
The smile that came to my face must have been grotesque, as Daman’s own faded into uncertainty. He backed away from the cauldron, and quickly and foolishly put aside his doubts to call his servants, unseen beyond the horizon of the cauldron. He faded into the darkness leaving only the play of flickering torches and shadowed movement. Their excited steps came to a halt as their shadows fell over the cauldron’s mouth, arranging themselves around it.
There was a flaring sound of burning as another torch was lit, and all became bathed in a phosphorescent blue. Even in my circumstances, I momentarily wondered at this, until Daman and his bedeviling chorus began to chant.
At first, the deep and sonorous voices might have been echoing from Dunhill’s cathedral, but it quickly became an eldritch refrain, the language becoming unrecognizable and unholy, bending around me in a way that quickly restored my previous panic. I began my struggle anew, trying to move myself so I might get ahold of the razor, feeling that I was racing Daman’s words as whatever diabolical ritual he was conducting gained speed.
Given time, I knew I could reach the razor and free myself from the ropes. But as the heavy words continued, they seemed to form a fog that laid itself across my mind, pulling it into a strange netherworld that existed neither inside nor outside of me, but in some morpheus place in-between. As if bidden, I felt myself move into that cerebral murk, with no feet of my own to stop me.
I stepped through that fog until it started to coalesce as a new prison outside of the cauldron, surrounding me in a heavy, broken flesh, an age and ache to my bones that my youth was unfamiliar with, a cold that was even deeper than the manor’s. As something familiar yet horrible floated by me, I felt an excitement, an adulation, pass through me, a profane zenith of years of effort coming to pass. Against my will, I felt my own lips moving, intoning words that were unknown and foreign beyond human reckoning.
Then my lips stopped, a cough escaping them. I pressed on, struggling to complete the words that flowed from me, but the urge became uncontrollable, rattling the weak lungs and pained bones of my body. This continued until the expiration overwhelmed all else, except the need to out the invading poison. Hands dropped what they were holding, moving to cover mouth and then thrown out to catch me before I fell to the floor.
I blinked, and I was again in the darkness of the cauldron. Outside of it, the blue light had faded into the green from before, and only the faint sound of moaning was in the air. My limbs regained with their usual strength and pliability, and I rolled over to search with my backward hands the lower lip of the cauldron. The relief I breathed when I found the razor was so great I thought it might expel the gag from my mouth.
Cutting through the rope that bound me took time, but I only had the gurgling sound of diseased breath to interrupt me. The light of the braziers faded as I cut at the rope, stinging myself on occasion, but unwilling to let small pains stop my work as my life was at the end of it.
Naked and bloodied, I stood from the cauldron and lifted an uncertain leg to step out into the dark. I covered my mouth with the gag in case any poison remained in the air, but managed to navigate the lightless laboratory to find a table that I knew had a lamp upon it.
In the dim glow of the lantern, I saw the bodies of Daman and his servants, prone near the positions they had taken up near the cauldron. I picked up the last things I had hidden in the laboratory and took it over to my uncle.
I rolled Daman over with an ungentle foot, satisfied to see him staring up at the ceiling with unblinking, paralyzed eyes. I bent down, closer to him than I had been since I had fended off his last predations. I set the lamp down so I could better stare him in the eye, unable to control my own horrid satisfaction as a fear decades in the making clouded his vision.
“As you have note doubt ascertained, sir Uncle, you have been poisoned. It is a venom of my own making, one that paralyzes fast, but kills slow. Your limbs have ceased and, given enough time, so will your heart and lungs.” I held up the vial that I had taken from his table to make sure he could see the amber fluid in it. “Here is the antidote. A few drops on your tongue would restore power to you.”
In a testament to Daman’s terrible will, he groaned at this, eyes beseeching as he mentally reached for the ampule. His power over me was such that, even then, I nearly pulled away from him, afraid that whatever black magic he had left would come for me. I took pride to the point of pleasure that I did not, but stayed steady there, holding Daman’s salvation inches from him.
I let that moment linger and pass. I then took the midnight blue cloak from Daman’s shoulders to cover myself in the cold underground. Finished, I tucked the vial away into the garment’s interior pocket. I made a show of this and then my empty hands as if I were the magician, making Daman’s only salvation disappear from in front of his eyes. “I will not do this, of course. I will leave in this place, and seal your secret door behind me, burying you under your own manor for all eternity.”
Daman managed an expulsion of breath, a protest hurtled from the bottom of his dark soul, and I only smiled in return. “Yes, I knew about this lair, and the secret entrance to it from the library. It has been your arrogance as well as your evil that has been your undoing.” I stood, feeling that some final words or gesture should be necessary, with Daman’s wide and horrified eyes upon me.
Instead I stepped over him, moving to leave the cavern that would be his grave, without another word or backward glance. Once up above, I sealed the library’s secret door behind me.
For a time afterwards, at rough intervals, I imagined I could hear noises from the passage beyond. I ignored it. Eventually, it ceased.
Before an investigation by Dunhill’s Blackcoats required me to leave McDowell manor, there were a few occasions that I considered removing whatever cantrip Daman had set upon the door and replace it with a more mundane mechanism. But I would never do that.
Like my father, I was a man of science, not of magic.
Read the previous chapter here.
See the author’s published work here.
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