Charles Gerard is a writer from the United Kingdom who splits his time between New South Wales, Australia and London, England. His work has appeared in Alluvian and the Haunted Waters Press. (Twitter: https://twitter.com/Questioning_Why)
The Hippocratic Oath
I stood on the street corner in a state of dysphoria. The creases between my eyebrows – which my wife referred to as a sign of ‘wisdom’ – were a physical symptom of the anxiety that lay before me. I squinted into the unlit alley across the cobblestone road but there was nothing but the night’s darkness. There was a still chill in the air on this windless evening and my shoulders were angled inwards in a vain attempt to retain body heat. The capped hypodermic syringe, rotating in my fingers in the pockets of my trench coat, gave little cure towards my nerves. What if I could not produce it from my palm quick enough and deliver its payload?
With no breeze, the roads gave up the echoes of distant shoed-hoof and the rolling wheels of the body wagons. Street lamps, rising on slender, black poles, emitted the rush of the gas that powered them. Their glow, however, was subdued by a heavy, wet fog. With such visual impediment, every shadow had become a matter of frightened investigation. Beside the alleyway entrance, on the wall of a florist, faded posters for a circus – an event long cancelled – were glued beside warnings. A declaration from the Department of Infection, in bold red letters, cautioned against coming into contact with any person displaying peculiar manifestations.
Across my mouth, I had tied a mask to prevent inhalation of the contagion. A barking cough, emanating from deep within one’s lungs, was how the pathogens were said to spread. There was little word on a cure and the life expectancy of any soul exhibiting the first signs of the disease rarely went beyond two weeks. The body wagons – mobile incinerators – rolled through neighbourhoods on a weekly basis. Entire generations of families had been wiped out in a matter of months. Communities that once bustled with the boisterous voices of life now lay in a coffin of silence.
As the hands on my watch crept towards two-thirty, I had begun to grow restless. In my mind, I debated simply leaving and finding a different profession. My wife, a person of significant intellect, had counselled me on the benefits of the countryside.
‘We could return to my parents’ home. Father could get you a job in the factory,’ she had said to me after I had returned from another night of disturbing work.
The factory she referred to, a small annex hastily attached to her family home, was in the business of sewing garments. I could not resign myself to such a destiny. Working for Doctor Gebhardt, while not aesthetically glamorous, or even safe, was not a condemnation towards a life of boredom or poverty.
I was broken from my stupor as, from the bowels of the alleyway, I heard the grating hacking of some poor creature. The shocking thrill of apprehension turned my skin to a cold damp. Through the fog, a silhouetted skeleton hugged his or her torso as if it was threatening to elope. The figure shuffled, its ankles barely capable of lift; its coughs, a soaking expulsion of phlegm and blood, grew in volume as it inched closer.
Aiming my chin to my chest, I took a deep breath and sidestepped my way to the wall of the florist. My shoulder rested beside graffiti begging would-be visitors to ‘Stay Away We Are Sick’. I felt the very sinews of my muscles tense and droplets of uneasiness stung at my dilated eyes. I had engaged in this flirtation with a death sentence more times than I wanted to count and I still had not gained a stoic composure.
The thin being ventured its way past the threshold of the alleyway. Under the lamp, I could identify its features; it was a young woman. Her hair was short, brown, and unkempt; she craned her neck with some effort to reveal pale skin, once beautiful and now maimed by plague. As I took a hesitant step towards her, my attention was taken by the pregnant, yellow pustules around her mouth. Staining her cheeks were moist scabs, freshly picked, and dribbling a thin film of some kind of purulence. Her eyes were victim of – as I had heard Dr Gebhardt refer to it – blackened periorbital edema with the whites turned crimson.
The desire to escape the situation with brevity made my voice come forth in a wavering lack of confidence. ‘Miss, do you have the time?’ I stepped into her peripheral vision.
The young woman recoiled at the sight and sound of me. ‘Please. Please go away. You don’t want this,’ she stammered. Her own voice was strained with dehydration and cognitive confusion.
I pulled the needle from my pocket and thumbed off the protective cap. With a lunge, I swung the spike in a wide arc. It did not have to land anywhere in particular, just with enough force to break the skin. With my extremities shaking under the intoxication of adrenaline, I missed. In a panicking tumble, we fell to the cobblestones. Her strength, given her condition, was surprising and, despite outweighing her, I found it difficult to control the dying body before me. The wailing escaping her throat reverberated between the buildings and her fingernails clawed at my arms. In a moment of absurd clarity, I wondered if she was protecting herself or me.
With another wild swing, I pressed the needle to her forearm and it pierced the tattered taffeta blouse. I held her as she drifted away. Those red eyes filled with primordial fear gazed upwards at the sky. The human reaching the end of her life – with pus smeared across her mouth – was a painting of decay, bereaved of all beauty and potential happiness. I whispered a prayer of mourning for her as I removed the syringe and hoisted her, carefully, over my shoulder.
I walked through the sidestreets, the heels of my boots casting a percussive accompaniment. Above the empty houses and boarded up businesses, the spires of the music hall towered. At the very top of its highest peak, a single light shined. I wondered if a pianist could not sleep and had taken to their instrument. I envisioned them performing Gymnopédie No. 1; a slow, melancholy caress of haunting notes to drown out the drowsy choking of the young woman.
My knuckles wrapped against the delivery door to the apothecary. The peephole slid open to reveal the yellow-tinged eyes of Doctor Gebhardt. They pierced with a sense of malicious intelligence and they flickered to absorb the diminutive form I carried. He closed the peephole and the door opened.
The backroom of Gebhardt’s shop was filled with a variety of contraptions that I didn’t know the names of. Machines that whirred with mechanical energies, apparatus that hummed, and golden, spinning orbs with steam valves that piped, seemingly, of their own accord. The doctor had never answered my curious questions about them and I had seldom seen him use them.
‘Quickly. Place her on the table,’ he said, his accent betraying a flavour of Bavaria.
I eased the young woman down onto the cold metal slab. I did not know what possessed me, but I used the tip of a finger to edge her fringe out of her eyes.
‘Do not touch. Step back. How long has she been unconscious?’ Doctor Gebhardt asked as he strapped thick gloves, similar to those used by falconers, onto his hands.
‘Fifteen minutes or so,’ I supposed. I looked at the doctor. He was a man in his mid-sixties with a well-groomed, grey handlebar moustache. Portly, but not obese, his arms were thick with muscle. Unusual, I surmised, as I did not know him to have an affection for strenuous activity. He threw a black apron over his bald head and upon its front were the remnants of the viscera of those who came before this woman. He did not wear a mask.
The doctor pressed a button on a device I knew to be a phonograph. It began to click and hiss.
‘Patient one-hundred and six. Female. Approximate age,’ the doctor took in the full form of the person on the table. ‘Late teens, early twenties.’ He dragged a tape measure along her length. ‘Five feet, five inches. Weight is, approximately, eighty-five pounds.’ Gebhardt picked up an eyeglass and peered through it. ‘Multiple boils around the mouth. Sores. Appears to be in an advanced stage of the plague.’
‘Can you save her?’ I asked. My eagerness had gotten the better of me.
Doctor Gebhardt slapped the phonograph and cocked his head at me. ‘Why do you interrupt?’
‘I – I don’t want her to die. Can you save her?’ I found myself backing against the wall. The woman coughed. Each inhalation she made was a rasping struggle.
‘Why do you think we’re here?’ The doctor’s voice had dropped into a low growl. ‘This is what we’ve been doing for months. Each night, we try to save them. To find a cure.’
‘I don’t know if I can do this anymore,’ I said. A curious state of emotion had overwhelmed me.
He waved a hand at the woman. ‘Do you know her?’
‘No.’
‘Then why do you care?’ He said. The bottom of his fist tapped the phonograph. ‘Taking samples of facial excretions.’ Gebhardt produced a vial and used a scalpel to pierce the skin of a boil above her upper lip. He miscalculated the textile strength of the wound’s coating and its ooze splattered against his apron. Using the scalpel like a spoon, he dug into the woman’s face to drip a bloody amalgamation into the vial. She stirred briefly. ‘Discharge is darkened yellow. Infection is confirmed to be advanced,’ he said.
I chewed on the inside of my mouth and held my hands behind my back as he prodded and poked her. Doctor Gebhardt took samples of an assortment of materials; he conducted himself with an emotionless countenance that would provoke horror in any observer. He took cuttings of her hair, swabbed her mouth for saliva, and even clipped her nails. He labelled them in jars and tubes and then he prepared the needles.
Gebhardt pierced the woman’s chest plate with a thump. ‘Arsenic,’ he said, for the benefit of the phonograph. The plunger forced the chemical into the woman’s heart. She did not respond and her lungs continued to wheeze. ‘No reaction,’ he said. He turned his back to prepare something else and the rotting body went into a sudden convulsion.
I stepped forward, mouth agape, but Gebhardt held a hand towards me over the table. ‘Patient is experiencing paroxysm,’ the doctor said. The phonograph picked up the woman’s final throes. A recording which might have been the only validation of her existence on this earth captured her cries. I found tears of grief trickling down my cheeks as Gebhardt tried to restrain her. A few final heartbeats passed and she left this world.
He cleared his throat. ‘Patient one-hundred and six, cardiac arrest. Deceased. At -’ he glanced up at the clock. ‘At three-forty AM. The fifteenth of March.’ He took off his gloves and slammed them down on the counter beside an electrically-charged glass sphere.
I looked down at the floor. It held the physical memories of bloody feet dragged across its surface. ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I said quietly.
Gebhardt didn’t turn around. ‘Why can’t you bring me ones that aren’t as close to expiration? Don’t you care? Don’t you want to help these people? You keep bringing me subjects that I can’t work on.’
‘I would like to get paid and go,’ I said. I raised my eyes. His head was bowed, his hands splayed across the workbench.
‘Don’t you want to see your name on a bottle of the cure? Could you imagine that?’ He said. ‘The money, the fame. Just bring me a subject that is recently incubated.’
Deep in my chest, I felt an impulsive, miniscule tickle and my diaphragm contracted to let out a cough. Doctor Gebhardt slowly turned to look at me with his yellow-tinged eyes.