The Last of the Mayflies

Chapter 2

Darkness had blanketed the earth by the time I trotted in, and my mother awaited me in the doorway, her lamp casting deep shadows in the hollows of her face, as if someone had stuck a candle in her mouth and illuminated her skull within. Needless to say, it was not the most flattering look, and I felt a shiver of dread run down my back.
"Where were you?" She asked.
"In the city," I hopped down and unhitched Fig. "You know this."
"You're home awfully late. I was beginning to worry you weren't coming back."
Her words stopped me in my footsteps, and Fig lurched to a halt beside me, flinging his head up and down with displeasure as his stall was only a few steps away. (I had often wished as a child that animals could talk. However, I don't think Fig would have much of anything complimentary to say of me.)
"Mother," I looked back at her and a nervous chuckle escaped me. "I always come back."
A chilled breeze blew, and she clutched her coat tighter around her frail shoulders.
"Until you don't," It came from her lips as barely a whisper, perhaps not even meant for my ears, and she retreated inside, the door slamming behind her.
I stared blinking at the door until my vision blurred and Fig nearly ripped his reins from my hands.
"Alright, you old nag," I muttered as I led him into the barn.
I took my time, pouring him a mash of bran and oats which he heartily dug into, and spreading an additional layer of sweet smelling straw for his tired legs, which he promptly defecated in and then thanked me with a snort that blew snot and morsels of half chewed oats on my face. (He was a lovely creature).
As I shut up the barn, and walked down the path to the house, my feet shuffling in the dirt, I pulled out Barnsby's note and the glorious $20 he had graced me with. Did I tell my mother? Surely she would wonder where I got such money, and she surely would know that there was no way on God's earth that I had sold enough flowers to procure it. Perhaps she would assume that I had turned to crime in my rebellious teenage years, and mugged it off an elderly gent.
Of course I could just tell her the truth and explain exactly what had happened: that a well dressed foreigner with a delightful accent had just stumbled upon me on the street and offered a job of vague description for a suspiciously bountiful amount of money, and that I, in my infinite wisdom garnered in sixteen sheltered years, had willingly accepted.
That would probably garner me more yelling than a robbery.
But thankfully, as I stepped inside, I found the kitchen empty, except for a plate of a meager portion of something that more resembled what had just exited Fig's buttocks than a delicious and filling stew. Upon sampling, it tasted of what I assumed manure would taste (soon enough I would know for sure what manure tasted of,  but let me not get ahead of myself), and was cold and slimy with congealed fats. I glanced around the room, and then heard my mother's footsteps creek in her room above me, and with a relieved sigh, tossed it out the window.
I crept up the stairs to my bedroom, and the hairs stood on the back of my neck as I hurried past my parents' room, as they had done every day since my father had become trapped in there, his illness chaining him to that bed as he sank deeper and deeper into it, until one day he sank into the Earth itself. Even now, I could still hear my mother weeping over him, as she seldom left his side.
But no, it was not merely a memory. My gut twisted in painful contortions as I realized she was still sobbing now, all these months later. Did she do this every night? Was this how she coerced herself into sleep? Had she done this all those nights when...
I clutched the money in one hand, and held the other poised at her door, where it quivered instead of knocking. With a sigh, I lowered it and put the money away and hurried to my bedroom where I cocooned myself in blankets. My eyes refused to close, so instead I stared at the moon outside my window, which was in its last quarter phase. By next Monday it would be a mere sliver in the sky.
I would keep the money and the note to myself, until I discovered what Barnsby's offer was truly about. It would be better this way, in case it was, as a portion of my mind worried, too good to be true. I didn't think the woman could handle another crushing disappointment, let alone from me.

***
At last, that fateful Monday came around, and I was already off to a remarkable start on my first day of employment by being not just mildly late, or moderately behind, but egregiously, "it's nearly midnight and I have yet to depart my house" late. You see, I had set the day up perfectly—long hours spent working in the sun removing the weeds from the flower fields (something I was remarkably slow and horrible at, as I had to walk the fields with my father's illustrated book of plants and take the time to carefully compare each plant before I either spared it or yanked it out by its roots to perish, for I had one year rid an entire field of primrose, leaving behind just the weeds. In my defense, the dandelions were also yellow.), so that upon entering the house at supper I could feign exhaustion and perhaps an oncoming cold from such prolonged exposure to the elements, that my mother would be sure to leave me alone through the night to "sleep", and perhaps also avoid ingesting whatever abomination she had cooked up.
As I had decided to keep this all a secret from her, and due to her extreme (although not unwarranted) anxieties of being left alone, I could not just take tell her I was taking the cart out in the middle of the night for a pleasure ride, or even an errand, without suffering an interrogation and a curfew of which she would wait up for.
My grand scheme did not go as planned  I did end up suffering through a plate of chilled cow manure (this one was much looser in its make), and then my mother picked that night, of all nights, to suffer insomnia.
I laid in my bed for hours, listening to the ticking of my pocket watch mocking me, with my covers pulled up to my chin over my day clothes, in case my mother should peek in to make sure I was still contained within the safety of my chamber. Every so often, the house would become silent, and I would hesitate a few steps towards my door, just to hear her footsteps pacing across the hall or the sniveling of her tears.
But as the clock struck midnight, I decided that should she discover my absence, whatever grief she threw at me could easily be pacified by the good news of incoming money, which I would not be able to give her if I did not leave immediately and get to this godforsaken place already, and hope that Englishmen were not quite as observant of time.
I shoved some pillows under my covers in the approximate shape of a slumbering body and then slipped out the window, where I fell ungracefully onto my back on the short drop to the dewy grass below. It looked much easier when the cats did it.
Anyhow, I brushed myself off and limped my way into the barn where I woke Fig from his slumber with my racket, and he shot to his feet, straw embedded in his forelock and tail. He saw the harness in my grip, and I swear to you, rolled his eyes with a displeased snort. But centuries of domestication ran in his blood, and he hitched to the cart with little fuss and trotted off brightly at first asking.
Now, seeing as I wasn't a drunk or a criminal (which coincidentally seemed to go hand in hand), I had never been in town this late at night. It was truly astounding what a lack of sunlight combined with an overactive imagination, and an unfounded fear of demons instilled by a lifetime of forced worship did to the streets. Of course I knew that was the barber shop, and over yonder was the general store where I would go and buy candy in the days before I killed all the flowers and our source of income, and scattered amongst the buildings were trees in their bright fall plumage, but at this time they were menacing dark bulks waiting to jump me, and black, skeletal hands reaching towards me and Fig to drag us away to wherever the demons lived (which is at most folks' mother-in-law's coincidentally).
All the buildings seemed to blend together, and I feared I was simply circling the same street over and over and wasting more precious time, so I pulled over to the Tavern, the only building lit up at this ungodly hour, and found a man standing outside, swaying on his feet.
"Excuse me," I asked. "Do you know how I can get to 34 Maple Street?"
The man squinted at me and then rubbed his eyes before a crooked smile spread across his face.
"Yeah, I can take you for a ride," He said, his words slurring and smiling spreading. "And afterwards I can take you there."
It took me a moment to process his statement with my virgin ears—why on earth would I need him to give me a ride when I had a perfectly fine horse and cart? (Oh to be young and innocent). And then I realized that in my nervous haste of gathering my clothes earlier, I must have grabbed my mother's coat, and it had been quite some time since I last cut my hair. An odd, high pitched noise escaped me, a sort of "Hu-huh-HAH!" and I smacked the reins on Fig's rump and fled.
I gained a new respect for women that night.
A short time later, I did manage to stumble upon the correct street and trotted up the dirt driveway to a squat, single story stone faced building, well set away from its neighbors. You could tell, by the untended flowerbeds, of which the flowers were mostly weeds, and the rickety fence in need of some new planks, and the front door in desperate need of some new paint, that the building was either rarely used, or had been uninhabited for quite some time and just recently brought back to life.
But a warm, homey light glowed from the windows, where I could see shadows flitting back and forth.
I climbed the small, three uneven steps to the front door and knocked. Footsteps approached from within, and for some reason, I felt my heart begin to race.
Burke answered the door, with sweat beaded on his brow and a new set of suspicious stains on a different shirt than the one I had met him in.
"About time you showed up," Absence had not made his heart grow fonder, apparently. "I was beginnin' to think you ran off with the good man's money."
"Well, I'm here," I offered a grin.
Burke did not return it, and instead went to wipe his brow with his arm that the door had previously obscured, which displayed the human arm—freshly removed from its body by the rawness of the stub where it had once attached to a shoulder—he held in his grasp. The movement caused it to wave to me.
Both of our eyes widened as we both realized his mistake.
"It's not what you think," He said.
"Murderer!" I shrieked.
"I didn't kill him!"
My mind raced back to our initial meeting, and that hungry look in his and his mentor's eyes at the mention of my poor, dead father, and then I thought of a vulture, plucking the meat from a ripe carcass and a novel idea caused my mind and threatened to weaken the integrity of my bladder.
"Cannibal!"
Burke reached for me, just missing my arm (perhaps to add to his collection, I thought at the time) as I hurried down the steps and fell on my buttocks in my great haste. I scrambled to my feet and continued to shriek accusations worthy of a hanging at him as I fled towards the safety of Fig—who dozed and ignored my theatrics—and the cart. Burke retreated into his lair and  began yelling for Barnsby, agitation creeping into his voice with each repeated call.
Oh, I'd really done it now. Of all the idiotic things I had done in my life, this was sure to top them all. (And it is quite a list. For example, as most young men do at the start of their teenage years, I had discovered that... touching... certain body parts could lead to enjoyable results. Of course, this was frowned upon by most religious factions. Well, one day, after helping my mother prepare dinner, I found myself feeling a certain sort of way, and well, I took care of it. And then I was overcome with the most searing burning sensation I had ever felt in my entire life, on my most sensitive region! I was so alarmed, and it would not cease, and I feared God himself had caught me in the act and punished me. So I had to then swallow what little pride I had, and inform my father of my affliction. And my father looked at me, and with a resigned sigh and shake of his head, told me to be sure I rinsed my hands after handling spices.)
How would I explain to my mother, God help me if she found out, that I had sold myself to cannibals? I'd never be allowed to leave her side again—in fact, the woman might have chained me to her.
I jumped into my seat and whipped Fig awake, but the damned thing refused to budge. Directly in my path of escape was the Englishman himself, decked in pajamas with his nightcap askew.
"Eli," He called. "Please settle down. It's not what you think!"
"You killed a man!" I yelled back. "And now you're going to eat me"
"No one was killed. The man was already dead," Barnsby sighed, as if he was an exasperated school teacher. "And no one is getting eaten."
"You didn't tell him anythin'?," Burke yelled from the doorway, having at least had the decency to have put the severed arm down somewhere. "How could you hire him and not explain anythin'? What did you feckin' expect!" 
"I was planning on explaining everything in due time, my boy," Barnsby's smiled, though it more resembled a grimace than a grin. "This is not exactly the most enticing of work."
"When? When we bloody dig up the feckin' body? I told you, I don't need no help!"
"The what?" My voice found this moment appropriate to revert to its previous feminine pitch.
At last, the Englishman reached the end of his remarkably long rope. He called for silence in a loud shout that seemed to echo through the trees, long after the cacophony of voices ceased.
"Please," He took a deep breath. "Come inside and allow me to explain everything."
"I think I'll just be heading home," I replied. 
"Please, I'll pay you whatever you desire, just name an amount. Just allow me to explain so that you can see that this is all a large misunderstanding and there is no need to get the law involved."
And the Englishman smiled at me, somehow both confident and pleading and charming all at the same time.
The promise of money, naive idiocy, and total lack of regard for my own life and wellbeing, won me over. I sighed and climbed down from the cart.
"Oh, excellent," Barnsby's face visibly brightened, and he offered his arm to help me the rest of the way down. "I do apologize for all of this. And Mister Burke's behavior. He just tends to lose himself in his work these day, with all of his self imposed expectations and deadlines. I do swear, he is a man of excellent character, and a mild temper."
If ever there was a word to describe that man, I highly doubted it was "mild".
Barnsby led me inside, which I discovered to be an ordinary, if charming home, with a warm fire glowing in the fireplace where a pleasant smelling stew bubbled in a pot. Tall bookcases lined the walls, and were filled to the brim with books of various shapes, colors, and sizes, and a woven rug that covered the floor in front of them contained several opened books, placed atop pillows someone had drug over to sit and lean on. A large table had a single setting placed for someone's very late supper, and nearby was an enchanting piano, that almost seemed too large to have fit in the doorway. A vase had been placed atop it that contained a handful of bright wildflowers, that I recognized as the ones that grew near the stream where the mayflies lived and died.
And then Burke approached the fire and lifted a human skull from the pot, and dissatisfied with the bits of flesh that still clung to it, plunged it back in.
But otherwise, perfectly normal it was, until you looked towards the left, where far from the reaches of the fire was another table, with a setting of a very different kind. Here, a sheet had been hastily thrown over a human shaped bulk, and the fingertips of the arm that had previously greeted me peeked out from beneath. Various knives were strewn about, some covered in a suspiciously red substance. There was an additional bookcase here, that while it contained a few volumes of writings, was mostly stuffed with human bones. However, even to my untrained eye, there was something off about them, as if they were misshapen, some with deep craters eaten away and others with protrusions from an overgrowth of material.
"Please, have a seat," Barnsby pulled out a chair, and then sat down across from me and folded his hands on the table. "Would you like some tea?"
"I-I'm alright," I stuttered, not quite sure if I trusted any beverage from this man.
"Oh, don't be shy! I'm going to have some as well," Barnsby smiled. "Burke! Bring us some tea please!"
Burke emerged a moment later with a teakettle and a tray of cups that rattled in his grasp. He set them down, and when he poured my portion of tea, poured most of it into my lap, and though he uttered a noise that may have been an apology, I was sure he did it on purpose (he did).
"Lovely," Barnsby sipped his tea and smiled at his apprentice. "Oh, we're going to need one more setting."
"Who else did you invite?" Burke sighed, rubbing his face with his blood coated hands.
"Oh, just Miss Delia."
Burke's hands flew down, revealing a face drained of color.
"W-What? Why?"
"She wished to come," Barnsby shrugged.
Burke's face regained color, a vivid red, and I half-expected to see steam shoot out from between his ears. Seeing as I wasn't the focus of this anger, I found it amusing and had to exercise great restraint to keep from laughing at how Barnsby had managed to rattle such a rough man with just two words.
And then there was a knock at the door, which Burke glanced at with panicked eyes before he looked down at his soiled shirt and dirtied hands and fled to what I assumed was his bedroom.
"Uh," I wrung my hands as the knocks continued. "Should I get that?"
"Oh, no," Barnsby waved his hand dismissively. "She'll just let herself in."
Just as the words left his mouth, the door slammed open, and the freckled, curly-haired, and fine-boned object of Burke's fears entered. She scanned the room with her hazel eyes, that had a sort of mildness to them that one could easily mistake for sleepiness, or worse, laziness, and her lips curled into a pout.
"Where's Burke?" She asked in a voice that was sweet and summery.
The devil himself returned, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to place another teacup on the table, and almost sloshing hot tea all over his new, clean attire.
"Here," He cleared his throat.
I felt that smug grin returning to my face, and could feel my tongue and mind rubbing their hands together in glee. They saw quite clearly what was going on there, and all the ripe fodder for verbal torture it contained.
"Miss Delia! Please sit," Barnsby waved her over. "Have some tea!"
Delia took a seat besides me, and gave me a warm smile. She was quite ordinary looking, if I did say so myself, but her smile, with her slight buck teeth, just came across as so genuine, you couldn't help but to smile back. There seemed to be an aura of sanity about her that I most appreciated, especially in that moment, and I almost wished to clutch her arm for safety.
Burke took his seat and began to eat his dinner after much persuasion from his mentor.
"You must be Eli," Delia said. "You are just adorable!"
Burke's fork stabbed through his chicken with enough force to create an ear grating clank and scratching on the plate, and he maintained eye contact with me as he ripped a chunk of meat off and slowly and methodically chewed it.
"I was just explaining some things to Eli," Barnsby said to Delia, before turning his attention back to me. "Back in London, I was a surgeon. Quite a good one at that. I could perform the fastest amputation of anyone in England! Anyhow, I was invited to Edinburgh to teach a course of anatomy for future surgeons at their Medical School. It was here that I met my lovely apprentice."
And Barnsby reached over and gave Burke's shoulder a good shake. Burke in turn grimaced and nodded his head towards the clock, which was about to strike one in the morning. Barnsby sped up (marginally) and explained to me how they had begun researching the effects of certain diseases on bodies, in hopes to backtrack and find treatments and possible cures for said diseases. However, in Edinburgh, only bodies of the most hardened criminals (being those who not only were condemned to death but also dissections as well) were available to research, and seeing as they had to compete with the medical school for resources, research was difficult to accomplish.
"You see—and I may offend some with this—people refuse to donate their bodies to research upon their death, even when it will serve to benefit all of humanity, and they no longer have use of it! But no, dissection was a horror they used to dispel crime, because people have these unfounded religious beliefs that the body that is put into the ground is the one they will gloriously rise from the dead with, and should they be hacked to pieces, that is the way they will rise. I regret to inform you that we will neither rise from the dead, and that everyone's body turns to mush in the ground."
"That can't be true," I said.
"It is," Burke nodded. "Dug up quite a few bad ones, myself."
"Well," I scoffed. "Obviously they weren't one with God, then."
And Burke looked me directly in the eyes and said, "They were nuns."
As an until recently avid church-goer, I found myself shook.
And then, Barnsby continued, that pesky pair of Hare and Burke with their murderous ways who made anatomists, an already disliked group, absolutely vilified, and nearly chased poor non-murdering Burke out of town (Burke's face turned quite another humorous shade of pink at this part.)
"So I felt it was best to start somewhere new, somewhere where things were more chaotic and wild and savage, and perhaps kinder to anatomists," Barnsby grinned. "So we came to America!"
All of this information, and the image of the severed arm, and the growing list of jokes I wished to make at Burke's expense all swirled in my head in a toxic whirlpool, and I had to pinch the bridge of my nose and shut my eyes to hopefully keep from vomiting.
"So, what is it that I will be doing?" I asked.
"Just as I told you," Barnsby replied. "Just driving work. Some of it will just happen to include picking up and delivering dead bodies here."
"And this isn't illegal?"
"Not so long as we don't take any belongings, such as clothing and the like, from the grave. You see, once a person is dead, the body belongs to no one, and therefore stealing a body is perfectly legal. Sure, if you get caught you may be fined for tampering with a grave, but I will take care of any such fines if it comes to that," And then Barnsby once again shook his long-suffering apprentice. "But Burke is such an expert at resurrection work that I doubt you will have any trouble."
"Isn't it exciting?" Delia placed a hand on my shoulder, a movement I knew Burke would be analyzing (Women are quite intuitive, and Delia had pegged me right away as a good friend. The fact that Burke ever saw any sort of competition with the likes of me still brings a tear of laughter to my ancient eyes). "Not so illegal that we risk being hanged, but just enough so to keep us on edge. What adventure!"
Burke and I locked eyes, and for the first time in our short acquaintanceship, found ourselves in agreement—that woman was insane.
And now, the most important question.
"I don't...," My voice fell to a whisper. "I don't have to touch... them, right?"
"No, my dear Eli," Barnsby shook his head with a small chuckle. "Not unless you'd like to of course."
"No thanks."
Burke loudly cleared his throat, and this time pointed to the clock.
"Well, Eli," Barnsby extended his hand. "Does our agreement stand?"
I thought on it for about a second, under the enormous pressure of three pairs of eyes boring holes into me.
Oh, what the hell, it sure beat planting daisies.
"Sure," I gripped his hand.
Next to me, Delia squealed with delight and squeezed my hand. "This is going to be so fun!"
Burke poured a substance from a flask into his tea before draining the cup in a single gulp.
"God help me."