The Last of the Mayflies

Chapter 3

And so, I went to collect my first body. I found myself evicted into the back of the cart while Burke commandeered my mighty vessel (something he had done as soon as we had removed ourselves from the Englishman's view, with a hearty shove that sent me rolling backwards to where I now sat, and had bruised not only my backside, but also my already fragile ego), keeping poor Fig going at a near gallop. Steam rose from the beast's coat, and I knew the chances of me receiving a kick to the face the next time I approached him with a harness were all but certain.
At least I found myself in good company in the back, joined by a shovel, a bit of rope, a burlap sack, and Miss Delia, who apparently was quite talented in the department of talking, in the fact that she never did shut up. I had learned the entire plots, complete with her opinions on the events and proper romance (or lack thereof), of the last three novels she had read. The girl was quite peeved that none of these stories included a woman protagonist as the role of a hero, going on adventures and fighting crime and saving the day and such. If a woman was featured, it was surely so she could be swept off her feet and married away to some boring man, to churn out his children until her uterus fell out at her feet (that line did cause a mental image to occur that caused me to choke on my own saliva).
And then she told me of her own version of meeting the Englishman, (without so much of a pause for breath, which was astounding, as I found myself winded just listening) which was a bit less dramatic than mine, in the sense she had simply answered an advert in the newspaper a few weeks ago seeking an adventurous woman with a love of socializing.
And when the old man had informed her that they would be dealing with dead bodies, she had signed up in a heartbeat, as it was so far beyond the realm of anything she had before seen mentioned for women. In a way, it would be like she was the protagonist—the heroine—of a new story! But she was a bit disheartened to find that her work was limited to attending funerals disguised as a weeping mourner, to survey the area (as no one would feel the need to question or suspect a weeping, at least moderately attractive lady), so that she could inform Burke of any difficulties he might encounter when he went to collect it.
"But then, Sir Barnsby invited me tonight to assist with collecting the body," Delia's eyes shimmered in the dark with her excitement. "Finally, some real adventure. I really want to dissect one of them, but someone won't let me."
That "someone" sighed at the not at all subtle complaint.
"It's not work suited for the likes of you," Burke said.
"Oh, so just because I have a uterus, I'm incapable of such tasks?"
"N-no," Burke seemed to flinch at that mention of female reproductive parts. "I don't care what organs you may or may not have. Neither of you have any experience, and the work is far too important and the resources far too limited for me to waste any of my time lettin' thrill seekers have a go at it. This is serious research."
"And you're so experienced?" I chimed in as well with a snide tone, although I wasn't bothered in the least by my exclusion from slicing apart dead human flesh. I simply enjoyed a good ruffling of feathers. (I chalk this up to what I call, the "Chicken Effect". So you see, if you put a group of chickens together, they will naturally find the weakest chicken amongst them, and proceed to peck them raw. Why? Who knows. You can't just ask them, they're chickens. But as someone who tended to be the "weakest chicken", I was always happy to get my pecks in should the opportunity present itself, and before they realized they had picked the wrong chicken.)
"I've been raisin' the dead since I was thirteen," Burke said.
"So how old are you then?" I asked.
"Older than thirteen," Came the reply.
I looked at Delia, who rolled her eyes.
"He's," Delia spoke with a pathetic attempt at Burke's Irish brogue. "A real man o' mystery."
Oh, this woman had a devil's tongue as well. I decided in that instant that I loved her (there is no easier way to begin a friendship than with a mutual dislike of a third party) and when she beckoned me closer to her, I leaned forward willingly. An evil curl started at the corners of her lips, and she focused her eyes on Burke before cupping her hand and whispering to me.
"Sir Barnsby told me that Burke much prefers the company of the dead to the living."
"Is that so?" I too eyed our victim, studying his back for any small movements, or signs of a struck nerve. (Peck, peck, peck)
"Oh yes," She nodded. "So much so, he said, that Burke has little success with living companions. Yet, he never complains for want of a woman. Which must surely mean..."
"... He wants a man?" I guessed, perhaps with too much excitement (those tattooed arms had done a number on me).
"No," Delia's smirk faltered momentarily. "He makes companions of the dead."
I titled my head. "What do you mean?"
"Eli," Her grin seemed to stretch to her ears. "Everyone gets lonely." (What a wicked, vile woman! Had she lived a few centuries prior, they surely would have burned her at stake, which yes, I did tell her on several occasions, to which she replied, "If I wasn't such a woman, would I truly be living fully?".)
I still didn't understand, as my mind had not yet been sufficiently tainted.
But Burke did, and he spun around in his seat. "I don't—maybe I prefer their company because they don't talk so much. I can hear you, you know."
"I know," Delia said sweetly. (Peck!)
And even in the darkness, I could see Burke's face redden.
"I don't need either of you," He said.
"Obviously you do," I scoffed. "Why else would Barnsby have hired us?"
"You don't know Ed like I do," Burke roared at a volume that misted my face with spit, and caused me to recoil several inches, almost into Delia's lap. "Nothin' with him is simple—there's always some feckin' hidden meanin' or some second purpose. So, no, I don't need either of you, and I for goddamn sure don't need any help!"
I was about quaking in my ankle length pantaloons, but Delia, that mad woman, tapped the snarling beast on his shoulder.
"You missed your turn," She said.
Burke's face twitched through an impressive variety of negative expressions, before he let out an irritated yell and turned Fig around.
We reached the cemetery a few moments later, and Burke wordlessly hopped down and circled to the back, where he pulled out his equipment and then slammed the door shut.
"What do we do?" Delia asked.
"Stay here," He barked, apparently still smarting about our previous teasing. "It'll be daylight by the time you two gobshites figure things out. I don't have the time. I'm sure you two can keep each other busy with your talkin'."
Delia began to protest, but the Irishman had already thrown the shovel over his shoulder and disappeared into the night. And, in quite an ironic way, the second he vanished, neither of us felt the desire to speak. We sat there, I twiddling my thumbs, and Delia twirling a strand of hair around her finger while she pouted, in absolute silence except for the chirping of crickets.
"Oh, he irks me," she growled, her hair snarled tightly around her finger. "Him and his tattoos."
"Me too," I said, and then paused. "Do you think he has them elsewhere?"
"I wonder," Delia pursed her lips, deep in thought, and then a strange sort of grin crossed her face, before she shook her head and resumed pouting.
And then there was the sound of hooves and men's voices, and another carriage pulled into view.
Delia immediately covered our lamp with her skirt, and the two of us flopped to our bellies.
"Is it the guards?" I whispered to her.
Delia hesitated a peek, and when she lowered herself back down, her eyes were wide.
"No," She said. "I saw those men earlier, when I was at the funeral. They weren't part of the family, and seemed greatly interested in the body as I was. Kept giving me the stare, you know?"
At this I too peeked over the edge and saw a group of three men entering the gates, of which one was carrying a shovel. It did appear that they also had some interest in the body.
"I got so excited when Sir Barnsby asked me to come along, that I completely forgot about them," Delia said.
And then I thought of Burke in there. Alone. And by the way Delia continued to wind her curls tighter and tighter around her digits, I assumed she was thinking much the same.
But then I thought of the possibility of conflict, and more importantly, all those dead and apparently mushy bodies just laying beneath the grass, of which I would have to walk on top of. What if a hand happened to burst through the ground and grab hold of my bare ankles? (A thought that also threatened to once again weaken the integrity of my bladder.)
He had told us he didn't need help...
"We have to tell him," Delia said.
"He told us to stay here!"
"Do you think I'm going to let a man tell me what to do?"
(I didn't.)
"If you want to cavort amongst ghouls, that's fine," I shook my head. "But I am staying right here, thank you."
"Fine," She shrugged, and then the insane woman leapt down from the cart, taking the only source of light with her.
It was dark, so oppressively dark, and it seemed to darken further with each passing second. The moon was no more than a fingernail clipping in the sky, and provided about as much illumination as one. The wind whipped up, sending a chill through my bones, and whizzing through the trees, where it almost sounded like whispers. I curled into a ball and hunkered down as far as I could, and then an owl sprang from the trees, shrieking like a devil, and spooked both me and Fig.
"Delia, wait!" I leapt from the cart and ran after her, chasing the bobbing light of the lamp.
This must've been a wealthy cemetery, with tall wrought iron gates that seemed to stretch to heaven itself, and stately headstones, spaced uniformly apart. Some graves even had cages upon them, which I believed served to keep people, like the ones currently touring the cemetery in the middle of the night, out. I thought it all very impersonal compared to the small church lot in which my father had been buried a few months prior, with his small cross shaped marker, within the wooden picket fence that they lovingly whitewashed each summer, next to people had had once worshipped alongside him, perhaps even were a friend, or a neighbor.
Delia's light had vanished, and I froze in place, my breath fogging in the air in rapid bursts from all of the running I had done. And as my eyes scanned the endless rows of headstones, my breath quickened further. It was astounding to me, how there were any people left walking this earth with the amount that were buried under my feet (I guess we have to thank the long, child conceiving winters for our continued existence). All of these people in their eternal slumbers, just mere feet—inches, below me.
As I walked, I tried not to step above them, hopping over each grave space to the narrow strip between that didn't contain a dead body.
How long had they all been in there? Were they fresh, looking as if they had just gone for a nap? Or were they like the skull Burke had been boiling: just bits of flesh clinging on tight? Or... or, were they just mush? A pile of sticky goo at the bottom of a casket?
What did my father look like now? My mother had buried him in the suit he had worn when he married her. Did he look the same as he always had, or had the flesh begun to melt away, exposing the bone beneath, and tainting his wedding attire with dark colored stains?
I had reached full on hyperventilation, when I backed into someone and they clamped a clammy hand over my mouth, which saved me much embarrassment by stifling my scream that surely would've been high in pitch.
"What the hell?" Burke released me.
"Oh, thank goodness," My knees went weak and I had to clutch onto the man to keep myself upright. "It's you." (Amazing how quickly our affections can change. A few moments ago I had hated the man, and now I would have kissed his feet had he asked me. Or his lips. Or somewhere else. I suspect he had wanted on several occasions to tell me to kiss quite another body part. Hint: something you might call a donkey.)
"What are you doin' here? I told you to stay in the cart," Burke looked behind me and narrowed his eyes. "You left Delia there alone?"
"She left me!" I cried.
"So you let a young woman run alone into a cemetery in the middle of the night?"
I sure did.
"Good god," Burke attempted to massage the surely forming headache from his mind. "Ed, you really outdid yourself."
"She said she had to tell you that three strange men that she had seen earlier at the funeral giving her the stare were coming to steal the body for themselves and she had forgotten before because she was so excited by the prospect of digging up a dead body," I blurted, hoping to defend my honor.
Burke's eyes widened.
"Well I guess we better hurry then," he tossed me a rope. "Help me get this thing out so we can find that crazed woman before they do. Men are disgustin' creatures, 'specially the ones in this line of work."
"Doesn't that include you?" (Ah, I thought myself so clever. But I seemed to have forgotten that I too was participating in this "line of work".)
"I'll put you in the feckin' ground, pup."
Seeing as he held the shovel, I decided not to press further.
Burke resumed his toils, removing shovelfuls of dirt from the head of the grave. He moved with what I could only describe as graceful fluidity, (which is admittedly an odd way to describe someone digging, especially on a fresh grave to steal a body, but if you had seen it you would have agreed, especially if you happened to be a sixteen year old in their primal surge of sexual awakening) and in a moment there was soft ting! from the shovel as it hit the lid of the coffin. Burke tossed aside the shovel and reached for the sack, which he placed upon the exposed lid before giving the lid a mighty tug. The muscles bulged in his finely sculpted arms with the effort it took, but finally the lid gave in and snapped in half, the sound muffled by the sack.
"The rope," He reached his arm out.
I took a hesitant step forward, every single limb of mine trembling. Do not look down, Eli. Don't look down into the pit of death—
"Hurry up!" Burke hissed.
I tossed him the rope, which he bound to the corpse's wrists, and then instructed me to help him pull.
(And now, what no one had told me, was that during decomposition, the body can produce a number of gases, which in life would have released in flatulence perhaps, which is quite humorous, but seeing as that exit—or entrance, I do not judge—ceases to work reliably once life ends, there can be a buildup. This causes the unsightly bloating we have all seen in perhaps the horse carcasses discarded on the poor streets in town. In extreme cases, this gas buildup can cause the skin to rupture. But sometimes, the gas finds another outlet of escape, such as when a corpse was moved and stretched by two men pulling it from its grave.)
As the corpse came above ground, it seemed to peer right into my soul with its half lidded, glazed over eyes, and it unleashed a deep, throaty moan, like something you could only imagine in your worst of nightmares.
And I can say for a fact that you can not wake the dead, as otherwise the scream I unleashed would have had every corpse rising from their coffin wondering what young girl was being brutally murdered. (You may have heard in prior, false recollections of this tale that I soiled myself at this point, but I assure you that is most untrue.)
It did however, wake the living, as evidenced by the shouts of men rapidly approaching us.
"Shite," Burke hissed. "Help me get the clothes off this thing."
"No!" This man was absolutely deranged. We should have been fleeing, not becoming overly familiar with a dead body. Pulling a rope was one thing, but touching it...
"Eli," Burke gritted his teeth, and smacked his hand on his thigh like he was scolding a dog. "Now!"
A garbled noise, a sort of 'Blurghaaah!", escaped me as my body completely malfunctioned, my knees quaking and feet shuffling and pores excessively leaking. And then I saw a look of eerie calm cross Burke's face as he held his hands above his head, and heavy arms forced me down on my knees and the cool edge of a gun pressed to the back of my head.
(And no, I did not soil myself at this point either.)
A second man gave Burke a similar greeting, minus the gun (a gross misjudgment), and then the third, who I assumed to be their leader as he wore the nicest coat and walked with a certain swagger, surveyed the freshly excavated grave before approaching Burke.
"Thanks for doin' the dirty work for us," His breath reeked of liquor. "But we'll be takin' it from here. I already got this one sold for a good $12."
"Over my dead body," Burke said. (Perhaps not the best choice of words for that moment.)
I began to wonder which I should fear more: the instrument of death pressed to my skull, or the Irishman who apparently had an upbringing quite different from mine that he found this life or death ordeal simply just another minor annoyance in his busy schedule.
"Ooh," The ringleader grinned at his crew. "A two for one deal, boys. We'll be livin' like kings tonight. Doc loves 'em fresh."
The men nodded and jeered their approval. I must've released a whimper, for they suddenly seemed to remember I existed.
"Well," The ringleader crouched down in my face, drawing tears from my eyes with his foul breath. "Maybe we'll even get a three for one."
"Leave him be," Burke said. "He's just a child who don't know what he got himself mixed up in."
"Just let them take it, Burke!" I cried. "We're outnumbered."
"I'll be fine," There was a subtle twitch in Burke's jaw, and a strange look in his eyes, that sent a chill down my spine as I suspected this "mild" temper that Barnsby spoke of was about to rear its head.
"You're Barnsby's boy, ain't you?" The Ringleader clutched Burke's arm, his fingers tracing one of the tattoos. "How much longer 'til we get to dig up his hunka' meat? That one will fetch a good price."
Burke shoved the man off him.
"So, think you're a big man, eh?" The Ringleader cackled.
Burke's hands twitched into fists.
Oh dear.
"Stop," I pleaded. "He's Irish."
"Funny you say that," Burke said, without any laughter at all. "'Cause your mother said I was the biggest she'd ever seen when I fucked her last night."
Mild.
The man holding me audibly gasped, and I wondered if they could hang a man for a murder of the verbal kind, and how Burke had managed to find trousers that could contain his massive family jewels. But none of it mattered anyway, because I was about to die. It had been an exceedingly average (and at times incredibly awkward) sixteen years. I guess I didn't have many complaints.
"You son of a bitch!" The Ringleader screeched, and lunged for Burke's throat.
Burke raised his knee with incredible force straight into his attacker's groin (if that man ever managed to reproduce, it is surely proof that miracles exist), which sent him crumbling to the ground like a felled tree. He then stabbed his elbow into the gut of the man behind him, stunning him long enough so that Burke could slam his head into a headstone, with enough momentum to chip the edge off. I watched this spectacle with my jaw dropped in a mixture of horror and arousal, as did the man who held me, who also seemed to be of similar make as me, in the fact that he seemed more than willing to sit this one out.
But Burke was not satisfied with a two out of three apparently, and he set his sights on my captor. I briefly exchanged a glance with the condemned man, whose loyalty apparently won out over any regard for his life.
He fired off a shot, which clipped Burke in the meat of his forearm and sent him staggering backwards. This sign of weakness bolstered my captor's confidence, and he managed to land a blow on Burke's face. But the Irishman was shockingly resilient, like a cockroach that refused to die no matter how many times you stepped on it, and with a quick gut-face combo, laid the last man on the ground.
Victory assured, Burke leaned over his knees and took a second to catch his breath. He started to say something to me, but I didn't hear, for I was too occupied noticing the Ringleader stirring from his stupor.
He jammed his boot in the back of Burke's leg, which sent the Irishman to his knees, and then gave him a taste of his own medicine, with a hearty shove into another headstone. And I watched, through the gaps in my fingers as I shielded my eyes, as the Ringleader took vengeance and landed blow after blow on Burke, who struggled below him as his face became dark with blood.
The Ringleader seized Burke's throat, whose legs and arms flailed helplessly, like a cockroach stuck on its back, as he choked and sputtered. 
"Eli," Came the hoarse cry. "Eli!"
And I saw that his blood soaked finger was pointing to the shovel that was just out of his reach, and just a quick step away from mine. But I couldn't move, for in that moment I was standing in the doorway of my parents' bedroom, watching as my father, grappling with Death, cried out for me.
The Ringleader saw this as well, and with a foot jammed against Burke's windpipe, reached across and grabbed the shovel for himself and held it above his head in a very King Arthur-esque fashion. Burke's eyes took on the look a chicken just before you chopped off its head, and with a desperate move he managed to avoid decapitation at the last second.
Instead, the shovel pierced through the flesh of his right arm, pinning the limb to the ground. Burke released such a bloodcurdling scream that I swear God himself must have heard it.
(You may have also heard that it was at this point I soiled myself. Suddenly... my memory fails me...)
And then came that heavenly voice, Delia shouting, "Guards, this way! I can see them!"
The Ringleader hastily roused his men, and they snatched the body we had planned to snatch for ourselves. He took a moment to stand over Burke and flip a coin onto his chest.
"Thanks for the help," He sneered.
Burke made an attempt to sit up, but it proved too much, and he flopped back down, an anguished groan escaping him.
Delia arrived and her hand rose to cover her gaping mouth as she surveyed the scene. 
"What happened?" She gasped.
"We got in a fight," I said.
"We?" Burke wheezed.
"Where are the guards?" I asked.
"They're not here. I just said it to scare them off," Delia knelt down besides Burke, her fingers poking and prodding at the various contusions and lacerations as they made their way towards the wounded arm. "Although I suppose they will be here soon."
"My arm," Burke's eyes darted downwards. "Is it bad?"
I glanced briefly at the mangled mass of flesh, shiny in the dull moonlight with blood, and of course the lovely protrusion of shovel.
"I'm sure it's not that bad," I offered. (Positivity, right?)
Burke glared at me (perhaps rightfully deserved) and then snatched the lamp from Delia and shined it upon his stricken limb, which in the glory of light was even worse than I imagined, more closely resembling a half butchered ham leg than a human forearm. I vomited in my mouth a little, and just managed to swallow it.
Burke's face paled, and a noise came from the back of his throat, while his breath came in short and shallow.
"Okay," Delia (women are much better suited to gore, I firmly believe. Must be why they were chosen to give birth. Imagine a man going through that experience? Heavens, there'd be no children!) took the light away. "Sir Barnsby will fix you when we get back. We're going to take you home now."
"We need to go after them," Burke insisted. "They took my body."
"I don't think that's a good idea," I said, my voice rising in pitch with each word.
"Of course you don't!"
"We can just find another one Burke," Delia said. "People die all the time."
"You don't understand. I need that body," Burke's voice cracked, perhaps the first shred of emotion besides anger I had witnessed from him, and he had to take a moment to focus on breathing. "He died of cancer."
The word pierced me much as the shovel pierced Burke, and I found myself in a daze, staring at my feet as Delia and Burke exchanged words back and forth, their tones rapidly becoming more heated. At some point, Delia pulled the shovel from his arm, which elicited another hair raising screech from the poor man, and then time warped, and the minutes and hours began to blur together.
Delia shrieked as she got sprayed with blood, squirted violently from where the shovel once was, and she attempted to stem the flow with her own hands.
"O-o-oh," Burke's panic was evident. "Eli, take off your belt."
"Are you serious? Right now?" I asked, my heart pounding. What a day this was turning out to be.
"Tourniquet."
"Turn what?"
"Just do it, Eli!" Delia yelled.
So, for the second time in my life, I removed my belt at another man's asking (shockingly, this was far more romantic than the first), and wrapped it snug around the arm as I was instructed.
We managed to get the man to his feet, and into the cart (which was still there, bless that animal), without him fainting, and without my pants falling. Delia sat with him, while I whipped Fig into a frantic gallop. By the time we pulled into Barnsby's driveway (in what surely was a world record time), the beast was worked into a lather, and any passerby who saw Burke would have surely thought we had succeeded in our quest to bring home a corpse.
(Now, for those of you reading who have thought they had a horrible day at work, just think of me, and I assure you, you will feel better. Not only was I late, I discovered my employment was mildly illegal and involved dead bodies, then got scared out of my wits in a graveyard, then held at gunpoint, had the body that I was supposed to steal stolen from me, and then had to return to my employer after all this and deliver to him his beloved assistant who had nearly had his arm severed. And I may have soiled myself. Might I remind you, this was on the first day as well. Oh, and it gets worse.)
We drug Burke up the front steps and I pounded mercilessly on the door, screaming for the Englishman. A moment later he appeared, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and illuminated us with a lamp. He woke up rather quickly.
"'Ello, Eddy," Burke slurred with a sloppy grin.
"Dear God," Barnsby said.
He rushed us inside, and began hobbling about the room with surprising speed, lighting as many lamps and candles as he could manage.
"There!" He pointed to a chair pulled close to the fire. "Set him down."
We deposited Burke in the chair, where he sagged down like a ragdoll. Barnsby returned a second later, dragging over a table with various instruments and a bowl of water that sloshed as he hurried, and a lamp which he handed off to Delia.
"Hold it over him," He told her, and Delia obliged, her face stiff.
In decent lighting, I could now see how poorly we all looked, from Barnsby with his wrinkled pajamas and tired, sweat streaked face, and Delia with her wind-whipped hair and bloodied dress and hands, and myself, with my own fair share of blood spatter, and of course my pants, in desperate need of washing.
And then there was Burke. Not exactly the most colorful man on a good day, his face was a shade of pale I had never seen, the only color on his body supplied by the dried, flaky blood and black bruises on his face, and of course the violent red that leaked from his forearm, smothering the tattoos and slowly creeping up the fabric of his sleeve as it saturated it.
"How did this happen?" Barnsby asked, his normally twinkling eyes suddenly very sharp and very, very scary.
Delia looked at me.
"Um, well," I pulled at my shirt collar, which felt oppressively tight.
"They didn't like my joke, Ed," Burke said.
"Joke?" Obviously we had differing definitions of the word. "You told him you fucked his mother!"
Delia's face contorted into a grimace, and Burke chuckled drunkenly, quite proud of himself. Apparently it only took a large amount of blood loss for the man to grow a sense of humor.
"You really must stop saying you've had sexual relations with men's mothers," Barnsby chided. "You know they don't care for that."
"Pshhhh."
Barnsby turned his piercing gaze back on me. Continue.
"There was three men, and uh, they found me, and they had a gun, but Delia saw them before and forgot to tell anyone—"
This elicited a glare from Delia.
—And there was a fight and the men stole our body."
"I tried to stop them," Burke said, his voice weakening, and now difficult to understand with his labored breathing.
"You stupid man!" Barnsby yelled, so sudden that it caused me to flinch. "Why would you do that? I've told you time and time again, that the risk nearly always outweighs the reward! What good is it if you are killed?"
There was no sound but the crackling of the fire and the drip-drop of blood as it rolled off Burke's fingertips and puddled below.
"I just want to help..." Burke stared at the floor.
Barnsby clenched his jaw, and his shoulders trembled with a barely contained rage, but then a flicker of sadness crossed his face, and he sighed. The twinkle returned to his eyes, and he placed a hand on Burke's cheek and gave him a small smile.
"Well, let's see what we have then, shall we?"
Barnsby poured water over Burke's wounded arm, clearing the gore enough to see that it had been sliced about halfway through, right down to the bone, which had fractured. The smile was gone.
"Eli," He turned to me. "On the dining table is a bottle of whiskey. Would you fetch it for me?"
"Uh, okay," I supposed many people did drink in times of great stress.
But Burke was wildly spooked by this mention of liquor, and began to shake his head, a terrified expression in his eyes, and tremble. 
"No," He looked Barnsby in the eyes.
"I apologize, my boy," Barnsby said.
"No!" Burke began to thrash, and as Barnsby restrained him, his fight increased. "You can't!"
"The whiskey, Eli," Barnsby barked. "Now!"
I scurried away and snatched the bottle, and when I returned Delia had joined in on trapping the man to his chair while he fought like a condemned man on his way to the gallows.
Barnsby took a swig from the bottle before he began forcing it down Burke's throat.
"What... is happening?" Delia seemed almost afraid to ask.
"Please Ed," Burke croaked. "I always use my right hand."
Oh, so that was his worry.
"It could be nice, Burke," I attempted to interject some uplifting words into the panic, as I could empathize with this particular anxiety. "If you use your other hand for a while, it might feel like someone else is doing it."
And Burke paused in his struggle long enough to look at me as if I had sprouted seven heads.
"I'm not talkin' about wankin', you sick bastard!"
I was mistaken.
"You won't be able to do any research if you die of gangrene." Barnsby said, poking amongst the various tools on his table.
"...Sir Barnsby?" Delia's voice was rapidly rising. "What are you doing?"
"Hold the lamp, dear," Barnsby instructed. "Eli, hold him down. He is going to struggle, but do not let him out by any means."
I gripped my hands around Burke's shoulder, as a massive pit formed in my stomach.
"You," Burke glared up at me, and snarled through gritted teeth. "I hate you!"
He then proceeded to describe how he wished to shove a sharp object up a very small hole on my body, of which fluids are only supposed to exit. (I will omit these words for the sake of any children reading.)
"Don't mind him. That's just the whiskey," Barnsby said. "Now, just relax, my boy. I used to be able to do this in thirty seconds in London. It's already halfway through, so maybe I can do fifteen!"
And when the Englishman raised an instrument that looked like it belonged in a butcher shop, I finally realized that he was going to cut this man's arm off.
(As I said, it got worse.)
There was nothing I could do. I was committed. There was no escape. I believe I had an out of body experience, as I don't remember much of anything at all. All I know was that there was a mighty scream, and then a loud thud on the floor, and then it was quiet. So quiet. Delia stood with her hands covering her mouth, and the Englishman wiped sweat and blood spatter from his brow.
Burke reclined in the chair, ten pounds lighter, and quite dead to the world.
"Well," Barnsby tossed the bloodied rag aside. "I believe that will do for tonight."
When I got home, I threw Fig in his stall with as much food as he could eat, and l labored by candlelight scrubbing blood from the cart until the sun had begun to mix yellows and pinks into the navy sky. I discarded my tainted clothing in the muck heap, and ran naked to the house, where I promptly drew myself a bath with the water as hot as I could bear. And it was here I sat motionless, even long after the water had cooled, with my knees hugged to my chest. I did not blink, nor did I breathe. There were no thoughts in my head, aside for an internal, unending scream.
I do not know how long I stayed like this, but one thing was absolutely certain: my mother could never know of what had happened.
When I managed to stumble my way with stiff legs to the kitchen for breakfast the next morning, my mother took one took at me and gasped.
"Eli, what's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost!"