One More Minute by MacLean Scott

Author:MacLean, Scott [MacLean, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2016-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

My Favourite Death: 1867

I died in the winter of eighteen sixty-seven and I can honestly say it was the first and last death that I truly welcomed. I learned later that I had been alive for a hundred and two years since my last resurrection and fifty-three years since the butcher Doctor Welch used my head like a block of scrap wood.

The memories of what happened to me in that time came flooding back to me like a tidal wave washing over a discarded parasol on a beach. Pain seared my mind as it tumbled over and over, and, in some weird, way it also inspired awe feeling the brain soak up all those years and try to reset itself.

Sometimes my difficulty is separating the experience of actual events from the later memory of them after so long on this earth. On occasion recalling my recounting of them is more real than the event itself but, this was different. My mind had closed in on itself after what I could only assume was a stroke. Probably caused by a watchman smacking me with his cosh when he found me raking through my victim’s pockets. It then almost completely shut down after the drilling began. The passage of time and any real understanding of the next half century evaded my hole-riddled brain. My only rational thought day after day, and year after imprisoned year had been that I wanted it to end. By the end I wasn’t even sure what it was that I wanted to end. All recollection of what had gone before was wiped clean.

When I awoke after my death I relived all those years in one relentless torrent. My head felt fit to burst. Unable to focus on anything I stumbled around for days with little to drink other than dipping my face in the river, and the thought of eating did not even occur to me.

I felt the drills, I saw the needles and I shuddered with the muscle memory of ice baths and electric shock therapy. Doctor Welch and his cohorts experimented with me like I was a laboratory mouse. As it was, I was so far gone that I couldn’t have beaten the rodent to the cheese during those years if the chunk had been sat on my bottom lip.

At some point during this flood of memories I could see images of Welch growing old, teetering over me with his latest good intentioned torture device. I can only give him the benefit of the doubt that he had some kind of moral compass that made him think he was making me suffer for the good of science - and maybe even myself. I also assume that by that point, to some extent, I was nothing more to him than a breathing experiment with crude reactions. Anyway, he must have grown so old that he either died or, got tired of poking and prodding me. He disappeared.

After that the memories changed to flashes of cage

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