Pulphouse Fiction Magazine Issue #10 by WMG Publishing

Author:WMG Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing

The first anemic rays of light clawed at East End’s cinder-smoked sky, the haze settling on jagged rows of spindly hovels wedged together with crumbling brick and brittle timber. Gritty air stank with coal dust, refuse, and unburied corpses in the churchyard. In the wake of another sickly dawn that moved the year another day closer to winter, jagged black shadows still wrapped the studio’s narrow alley in quiet darkness as Lord Alastair Sherrington returned.

In his bloodied fist was a fresh human heart.

The absence of civility was total in the young noble’s eyes, peeling back generations of domestication and grooming that made man king over the beasts of field and forest and gave him compassion for his fellow man—keeping him from becoming a monster.

Gone, like the extinguished sparks in his muse’s dead eyes. In three acts, Benedict had returned this cultured young aristocrat to the wild. Reducing him to his most savage form.

Benedict smiled. For art.

He accepted the heart, noting the young man’s torn sleeves and ripped waistcoat spattered with fresh, new blood. He approached Emilie, bone wand in hand as thin tendrils of first light streamed into the room through the shoddy roof as Benedict spoke the final incantation from the definitive treatise on reanimation.

Alastair hung at his left shoulder, feral gaze locked on Emilie’s face.

The young lord didn’t even flinch when Benedict wedged the freshly harvested heart into the pocket he’d sown into Emilie’s chest. When the heart was in place, Benedict laid his hand over the incision and chanted a verse. The final verse.

In the new day’s first pallid gray rays of sunlight, something returned to Emilie’s eyes. Writhed behind them, dull sheen of death receding at last.

Joy danced across Alastair’s face, the mask of despair lifting, a smile touching the corners of his mouth. Feral. Hungry at last.

“Emilie?” he cried, tears brimming in his tired, faded blue eyes.

She struggled to speak, but only a squeak came out as her lips moved.

Alastair flung himself against the young woman, sobbing and muttering unintelligible words as the rise and fall of breath returned to her lungs. The flicker and glow of life lit her eyes like relighting a candle.

But the wick was always shorter and a little burnt, the light duller than before. Washed out.

“Thank you,” Alastair cried, grabbing hold of Benedict’s hands, shaking them. “Thank you!”

Benedict just nodded as Alastair gathered the young woman into his arms and draped her in linen. He escorted Lord Sherrington and his undead muse into the alley and an awaiting carriage. He covered his nose with a linseed-oil-daubed handkerchief and watched the carriage lurch across the cobblestones, heading out of London’s filth. Toward his father’s estate.

Poor Alastair had no idea Benedict pickpocketed him earlier that evening.

He returned to the studio. His colleagues would arrive soon. He needed to finish the wax casting, his guide for her marble sculpture. And he needed to sketch intimate drawings of young Lord Sherrington, his muse. His David in marble. Both works would take time and bring him lots of coin.

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