‘Death to the blasphemers!’ The woman shouted the taunt as she handed Jameson the paper cone of pork grattons.

‘Death.’ Jameson answered with less enthusiasm as he tossed the coins into her hands. His French was still terrible after three months at the French academy of surgeons, but he understood enough to be sickened by the carnival air that surrounded the executions. All around him, French citizens purchased food and charms from street vendors. They pointed, jeered, and threw food waste at the two men in the stocks on the platform in the centre of the square. 

‘It is quite the spectacle.’ Barnham surprised him from behind. As always, his mentor was dressed for surgery in a black frock coat, white linen waistcoat, and dark breeches.

‘Here to pay your last respects to our French counterparts?’

‘I’ve come to make sure you understand the seriousness of these proceedings.’ Barnham’s eyebrows knitted together the way they did when a pupil was struggling to understand an important anatomical concept. ‘The church’s stance is that transfusion is a crime, an evil that invites devils into men, and is punishable by death.’

‘Does it not matter that it could save lives? What could be godlier than that?’

‘Do you think the devil is incapable of saving lives? I daresay he is likely to be a better surgeon than either of us.’

Around them the crowd quieted as the executioners’ boots thumped up the wooden steps. On the platform, the two men went still, though the older one sobbed openly. The executioner checked the thirteen coils on the two nooses hanging from the gallows’ crosspiece. Satisfied with the knots, he held out a fist and lifted his thumb to the clergyman standing on the other side of the platform.

The priest intoned the charges. ‘For trafficking in unnatural acts. For offending God’s created order. For seeking mastery over the blood of man and taking from God, what is his own.’ As the priest spoke the executioner took first one man, and then the second, from the stocks, over to the gallows where he fitted the nooses around their necks.

Jameson felt Barnham watching him, gauging his reaction like a physician checking a wound.

The executioner pulled a lever, huge muscles bulging, and the trapdoors fell open. There was an audible crack as the men dropped to their death. The older surgeon kicked twice before going limp. The younger one dangled longer, face purpling, legs kicking as he clawed at the rope. He finally went still, losing control of his bowels and bladder.

Jameson looked away as the excrement splattered at the feet of the crowd nearest the gallows.

‘They were fools,’ Barnham said softly. ‘They naively thought science would be their protection. But when you practice on the edge of what is permitted, boy, you must be cautious of which gods you offend.’

‘Perhaps I don’t believe in God?’

Barnham’s mouth twitched, somewhere between a frown and a smile. ‘Then you’d best hope the men who do never sit on your jury.’

####

The severed goat’s head stared at him from the hay-strewn floor, judgement in its clouding eyes. Dr. Jameson Stowe had stripped off his waistcoat and ruffled white shirt to keep them from becoming smeared with blood and mud from dragging the two goats into the cellar. The first hung suspended by its hindlegs from a support bar, bright arterial blood collecting in a stock pot beneath the stump of its neck. The second goat was unconscious. Jameson had hit the beast on the head with a heavy mallet and secured it to a bare metal gurney with sturdy straps. The beast lowed once pitifully. It would soon wake.

Jameson had used a barber’s phleam to perform the bloodletting, stitching closed any arterial nicks that didn’t clot to his satisfaction. Now the animal was dangerously depleted of blood, teetering on the edge of this life and oblivion. With a straight razor, he depilated a neat square on its flank to reveal the fair skin beneath. He filled a sheepskin bladder by dunking it into the collected blood, reddening his hands up to the wrists in the warmth. When the bladder was sufficiently full, he hung it from a support beam over the restrained goat, poked a small hole in it with a lancet, and quickly inserted a long delicate tube of silver. The blood immediately began to flow and Jameson clamped the other end of the silver tube between his lips, stopping the flow with his tongue as he bent over the restrained goat. The largest goose quill he could find was secured by suture into that goat’s corotidal artery and plugged with a small stick. Leaning over the goat, he removed the pipe from his mouth and quickly replaced the stick with the silver pipe, connecting the bladder to the recipient goat’s circulation and further slickening his hands with warm vitae.

It was minutes before anything noticeable happened. Jameson waited patiently, palpating the area around the animal’s heart for a steady pulse. Through the coarse fur, his experienced hands picked out the rhythm and he squeezed the sheepskin, increasing the flow of blood, careful not to force so much through the loose connections that they would burst. When he was sure it was empty, he cut the catgut holding the quill in place and carefully withdrew it. The opening was small, but he could not trust the success of this experiment to coagulation.

After long, tense minutes, the animal shuddered and began to stir. A raw bleat tore from its throat as its legs jerked, hooves scraping against wood. Jameson leaned closer, heart hammering, and took the twitches as a positive indication. With one hand he gripped his clothes, the other tugging loose the final knots. The ropes slithered away, and the goat exploded from the table with a violent kick, nearly toppling him as it crashed to the floor.

The goat staggered, legs buckling twice before it managed to stand. Then it turned, fixing Jameson with eyes wide and blazing, the whites stark against the dark. Jameson backed out of the stall slowly, transfixed by the look of fear in the animal’s eyes. He pushed the stall door closed just as it charged. The impact thundered through the wood, the horns splintering a deep dent into the wood, the hinges shrieking against the assault. The animal was strong. The goat slammed again, rattling the frame with its primal strength. But the door held.

Jameson leaned his back against the trembling wood, chest heaving. Fear and triumph tangled in his own blood until he almost felt drunk on it. A laugh burst from him – half hysteria, half elation – as he slid down to the floor, the memory of the dangling surgeons far from his mind. 

Against every warning, Jameson had done what none had lived to prove: he had pulled life back from the brink. He was the first. The only. He had done what no priest or executioner could erase. Yet as his laughter rose and echoed to the rafters, it felt too large for the space, as though it might carry beyond the walls and draw the notice of forces best left sleeping.  

####

At the crack of dawn, Jameson entered the operating theatre. The high windows bled pale light across the tiled floor, painting long shadows across empty seats where patients and nurses had already gone.

“You’re late, Stowe.” Doctor Barnham had removed his waistcoat for the procedure. He was rolling his linen shirtsleeves back down as he addressed his student.

“Forgive me, Doctor. I slept over-long this morning.” Jameson answered, trying abasement before he professed his sins.

“One would, when one is about all hours of the night with childish folly.” Barnham crossed his arms and stared pointedly.

Abasement having failed, Jameson powered forward with success. His mentor could not berate him if his experiments were successful. 

“It works, Alvin, I tell you, the transfusion works! I have proof!”

“You have a goat.” Barnham was ever one to remind his juniors that no matter what, his opinion was always the correct one.

“Will you come and see it?”

“Your goat? I am a surgeon, Stowe, and so overqualified to examine your goat. I would remind you that you aspire to be a surgeon, not a farmhand or a butcher”

“But the French papers say-“

“Is the goat French?” Barnham raised an eyebrow, a quirk that always gave away his acerbic humour.

“We are surgeons, but-

“I am a surgeon. You hope to be the same.” Barnham allowed himself a smile, but Jameson was still his junior, and he would make sure he knew his place.

“Are we not also experimentalists?” 

“Of course we are, but this French obsession with animal biology that you have adopted is unbecoming of an English Doctor. It could also, if I am to be honest as your mentor, and I hope friend, support the claims made by some that your pedigree alone should disqualify you from this occupation.”

Jameson bit his lip, a habit that manifested whenever his parentage was called to question. He would always make them speak it aloud, and he would make Barnham say it too. 

“You mean that I am an orphan.”

“That does no favours for you, either, however you know I’m referring to your obvious… non-English pedigree.”

Jameson had guessed the man’s meaning from the start. Orphan was only a prelude, a genteel veil over something harsher. Being without family did him no favours, certainly, but Jameson knew what the man truly meant — his skin, his African blood, the mark that would never let him pass as English.

To keep from spitting back his anger, Jameson worried at his lip, a nervous habit that had become a kind of shield. It had saved him from many lashings, the sort of casual cruelties that men like him — men of his descent — were expected to endure in silence. Punishments meted out not only for defiance but sometimes for nothing at all.

“You know that I do not personally feel that way. That I have taken you solely under my tutelage should say all that needs saying about my opinions of your capabilities.”

Jameson forced a smile, though he felt only the familiar sting of being reminded how others saw him. Prejudice, he thought, was like an illness. One could not hope to treat such a sickness without naming it aloud, without admitting its presence. To pretend otherwise was to let it rot unchecked.

“Of course not. You only remind me that everyone else does, for my own edification.”

“You go too far, Jameson.”

“Will you not check my notes, and observe the goat? I tell you, we are ready for men now’

‘We are not!’ Barnham was fully angry now. ‘Have you already forgotten those hanged men in France?’

‘I do not think I ever will. That doesn’t mean the science is wrong. Blood loss has deadly consequences, if we had a system figured out for quickly delivering healthy blood, we would save many lives.’

‘No surgeon would refute that.’ Barnham sat down in the leather chair behind his large desk. ‘But you are too rash. The Church’s opposition, the executions, now the charges against Denis. It is time to stop this. Or do you want to be the first surgeon to hang in England?’ 

Jameson sat down. ‘Are we to let religious fantasy overrule scientific fact?’

‘Your personal opinions on religion do not affect the Church’s influence.’

‘And your own? You have listened to mine without comment these past years.’ Jameson settled.

‘I am as religious as any gentleman of my time, I suppose. And as committed to the pursuit of knowledge as any doctor. I do however concede that there are mysteries beyond my comprehension, and God is as likely a source of those mysteries as science.’

‘The typical measured response of an English gentleman. But science requires bravery.’ Jameson pressed him.

‘I can be brave with my own reputation, but it would be rash of me to be brave with yours.’

Jameson’s expression hardened. ‘Is that a warning, Dr. Barnham?’

‘No.’ Barnham rubbed at his eyes, his expression tired. ‘It is a decision. I am writing to the surgery board. You are talented, brilliant, even, but you lack restraint, which makes you dangerous, Jameson. To your patients, your colleagues, to yourself. I can shelter you no longer, and The College will not without my support.’

‘You’re ending my career, Alvin?’

Jameson breathed heavily, his heart constricting in his chest as the reality of his situation set in. He lived at the hospital, through Barnham’s generosity. What little social life his Moorishness afforded him was with other students. He would be destitute. 

‘For unsanctioned animal experiments, without any oversight or regard for safety. For putting ambition over ethics.’ 

‘You said medicine needed men with bravery.’ Jameson stood up, trembling.

“Indeed, it does. But it needs them to be brave and careful. You are only one of those adjectives.’ There was a long silence, but Barnham softened a little, his eyebrows unknitting. ‘I am sorry to see you go, Jameson.’

####

Hours later, Jameson stood in the alley behind the surgical hospital, drawing the hood of his cloak down over his face. In his hand, his keys to the surgery and apprentice dormitory were heavy. Barnham hadn’t even bothered to take them from him. Perhaps that was providence. 

A peal of thunder shook the world around him. He stepped through the loading doorway the graverobbers used just as the rain started to fall.

In the darkened hallway, Jameson slunk past the offices, ignoring the flickering lamplight behind Barnham’s office door and made his way to the surgical theater. His mind made all the familiar shapes he’d seen in the light of day were monsters waiting to devour him. Barnham’s laboratory was through the theater. It was little more than a closet. The air was cool and metallic. He didn’t dare light a candle, so he found the equipment he needed by muscle memory alone. Silver tubes of varied lengths from the drawers beneath the glass cabinets. Two sheepskin bladders from the bucket in the far corner, and phleams and lancets from the metal tray at the foot of the dissection table. 

On his way out of the door, he noted the shape of a thick folio of anatomical drawings, his own, tucked beneath one of Barnham’s notebooks. He took the notebook and the drawings. There was more paper underneath, the French manuscripts. Jameson took those as well. 

He told himself he deserved them. Are we to let religious fantasy overrule scientific fact? he thought fiercely. The drawings, the equipment — these were tools. And if he could master them, if he could refine a system for delivering healthy blood, then he might save lives where others only preached against devils.

####

The Crown and Clerk was lit by candlelight. The old oak bar was lined like an altar with burning candles. Smoke curled up toward the chimney creating an artificial cloud cover that mirrored the storm brewing outside. A young fiddler played something thin and mournful near the hearth. 

Father Charles Angevin sat across from his brother, looking more like a retired soldier than a man of the cloth in his plain coat and nothing save the silver cross at his throat which caught the light as he reached for his wine, to mark his piety.

Jameson had aged since Charles last saw him. His cravat was poorly tied, his coat, always a point of pride, was stained with a crust of dried blood.

‘You’ve been lax with your cleanliness, the mark of a butcher surgeon is all over you.’ Charles spoke with a slow, deliberate cadence of a man accustomed to pulpits, his voice carrying judgment as much as truth.

‘Urgency must sometimes outrank caution.’

‘Evidently, your mentor did not agree. And now that the college has turned you out Jameson, how do you feel?’ Charles asked evenly, watching his brother’s face for the wince.

‘Relieved,” Jameson said, swirling the last mouthful in his goblet. ‘They were backward men, guarding a dying institution.’

Charles gave a small laugh. ‘So, no part of you feels regret? Disgrace? Dishonour’

Charles picked at the wax seal on the wine bottle, his nails bitten down to the quick. ‘To excel, one must push the boundaries of experimentation.’

Jameson would always be the petulant child Charles remembered from the orphanage. ‘You set yourself in God’s place, Jameson, not as a servant but as one tempted by the illusion of mastery’

A barmaid approached to refill their claret. She stared unabashedly at Jameson when he placed his coin on the table. Charles had to grab her hand to stop her from overfilling his glass while she gawped. 

‘Careful, miss,’ he said gently, the silver cross glinting in the candlelight.

‘My apologies, Father,’ she mumbled.

‘It’s no sin to be curious.’

The barmaid ducked her head, coin clutched tight in her fist, and slipped back into the press of the tavern, though not without a final glance at Jameson before vanishing into the crowd.

‘She wasn’t curious.’ Jameson let out a weary breath. ‘She was amazed that a Moor had enough coin to spend on wine.’

‘Perhaps she was afraid of the wild man, covered in blood and stinking of sheep?’ Charles countered.

‘She ought to be. Men of medicine are hunted now, same as heretics.’

Charles sighed. ‘You have always carried this burden of inferiority like a badge.’

Jameson leaned forward. ‘It is not self-imposed, Charles. Do you remember that warm October night we ate grapes from the Seminary’s vineyard?’

Charles recalled the two of them as boys – brothers on some mischief of an adventure. The memory of Sister Agnes followed swiftly, her cane whistling down on them.

‘Sister Agnes. A demon with that rattan. Fifteen strokes.’

‘Fifty. For me, it was fifty.’

Typical of him, Charles thought, to exaggerate.

Other memories came too. Father Nichols’ pronouncement that Jameson would never be more than a missionary. Charles had countered that no priest decided alone who could or could not be ordained, but Jameson accused him of being obtuse and blind to his experience. 

A lifetime of such blows, Charles admitted to himself, had unduly pressed on Jameson until the weight became part of him.

‘The Church would not make a place for me.’ Jameson swallowed another gulp of claret. ‘In medicine I found a semblance of the brotherhood, the camaraderie I never felt in seminary.’ 

‘That I never gave you.’ Charles matched him, sipping his own wine.

‘No. You were the one bright spot in all those years. A brother truly. But one man alone could not stave off so much darkness.’

This sudden softness took Charles by surprise. Then, he remembered his brother, the adventurer, the schemer, who led them both to more than one lashing throughout their time in seminary. 

‘Why are you really here, James? What do you want?’ 

Jameson glanced toward the window, then back. ‘I need a place to work. Quietly. I need a cellar, a storeroom, anything with a lock and a table.’

Charles narrowed his eyes. ‘You mean to keep experimenting.’

‘I have no institution. No license. No title. Only my notes and my hands. Let me use the old catacombs beneath the infirmary, no one goes there. It’s dark and damp, yes, but private.’

‘And what will you be doing? Dismembering frogs? Stitching pigs together?’

‘I need to replicate the goat transfusion, and I should like to try pigs next,’ Jameson replied. ‘With a new veinous clamp and tubing of my own design. I think within a fortnight, I will be ready for men.’

Charles stared at him. ‘Beneath God’s house… Perhaps the French are right, you go too far.’

‘Transfusion works better than stale sermons and children’s prayers. My patients may yet be actually saved from their ails.’

‘You are impossible.’. 

Jameson met his brother’s gaze. ‘I am what the world has made me, Charles.’

After a long pause, Charles drained his glass. Jameson’s complaints about the church were not completely unfounded. He remembered the zeal behind his young brother’s eyes, the pure faith of his childhood. He remembered watching that faith die a little after each of his private lessons with Sister Agnes. 

‘You may use the old catacombs. If the dead don’t trouble you, and only at night. But if you bring scandal to my door-‘

‘I will be as quiet as those tombs. I promise.’

Charles shook his head. ‘You’re a man of blood now, Jameson. Not God.’

Jameson smiled grimly. ‘Blood, at least, always tells the truth.’

####

The old catacombs lay abandoned beneath the seminary, like a buried sin. Damp stone corridors with alcoves lined the walls, filled with the bones wrapped in rotting linens. These were the bones of the unworthy, the destitute, the discarded. When the new church was built, grander catacombs were carved into its foundation and the bones of the worthy, the wealthy parishioners, the Priests and Sisters Superior, were moved there. The undesirables were left behind. 

Jameson had found a corner near a bricked-up infants’ ossuary, clearing just enough space for his crude surgery. A door lashed to two crates served as one operating table, a discarded, large writing desk served as the other, and his stolen and homemade instruments lay scattered across a bench dragged from the gardens and a stone sarcophagus.  Only candles lit the chamber, guttering from old sconces and  burning in clusters atop the dusty sarcophagi. 

James stood over the pig, already tied to his rough-hewn table. It squealed and thrashed, its eyes wide and rolling, as he pressed a blade just behind its ear. Blood jetted in a thin arc, hot and fast, spattering his face and sleeves. Quickly he inserted the iron clamp into the artery, closed the inlet and pushed a silver tube into the outlet and clamped it tight. He turned the small valve and blood sluiced out. He turned it closed. He went around the desk serving as the second table and pushed, inching it closer to the first. 

Above him, muffled through stone and prayer and wood, the nun began to wail again. Jameson knew that the nun was sick – he had offered to see her, but Charles refused. The sound was inhuman: more of a guttural cry that rose in shrill, warped intervals, a howling that made the hairs on his arms stand upright. Then silence. Then a low groan, long and wet and full of animal longing. 

Jameson stared up at the ceiling, The wailing scraped at his nerves. He clenched his jaw. He had taken a Hippocratic oath, but God, literally above, if only she could be quieter. 

He wiped his brow with a bloodied sleeve and turned back to his work. The second pig lay unconscious on the makeshift table from laudanum in its mash. Jameson opened the flesh, probing until he found an artery wide enough, and he repeated the clamp and tube insertion. This animal would serve as the recipient. He readied the sheepskin bladder that would connect to both tubes, blood from the donor animal collecting in it, before he stopped the flow, opened the clamp on the second animal, and squeezed the bladder to force the blood in the recipient.      

Jameson paused, eyes narrowing as the candles nearby quivered though no draft stirred the air. Their flames bent in unison, as if troubled by some hidden breath, shadows stretching long across the stone walls. He watched, unsettled, trying to make sense of it, but before he could puzzle it out the nun screamed. Her voice was different this time – deeper, angrier – the sound clawing into his skull. Jameson jumped violently, the bladder slipping, and tugging the donor tube and clamp out. They clanged off the table and slid into the darkness beneath the table. 

‘Damn it!’ he swore, kneeling to find the equipment as warm arterial blood erupted from the donor pig, running over the table and dripping onto the stone floor. Jameson grabbed a candle holder and thrust it under the table, his head following, heedless of the blood that spattered his face. He was on his hands and knees when suddenly, the candles all went out in a single breathless moment, and the dark came down like a curtain. On the table the pig convulsed, the last of its life blood pumping through Jameson’s incision.

Jameson wrapped his blood-slick fingers around the cauld iron of the clamp. To his shock, it was burning hot to the touch, but he could not let it go. A chill ran through him, sharper than the pain. Something was wrong.

Above him, the nun began to chant. The sound was rhythmic and guttural, not Latin by his memory. The syllables pounded in his ears like drums in a fever dream, keeping time with the patter of blood dripping on his back and neck. It snaked past his collar and down his spine, touching him intimately, like a lover.

Then he heard something else: wet footsteps. Not from above, but behind him. Jameson scrambled out from under the table and seized a flint, striking until the candle flared. When the flame caught, light rushed into the catacomb, illuminating nothing. Just the walls. Just the blood. No footsteps. And from above, silence.

Slowly, he turned back to the table. The pig was staring at him, its mouth slack, opened as if to speak.

####

The scream pulled Father Charles to his feet. His mind was already racing, as he sprinted toward the commotion, it was coming from the infirmary.  He thought of the sick woman there, Sister Catherine. Catherine, always steady and obedient, had fallen ill only days before. There had been no warning, no fever, no frailty to explain such a collapse into madness. His boots carried him swiftly down the nave, through the cloister. He threw open the heavy wooden doors to the infirmary.

‘Sisters… What is happening?’ 

A Novitiate, Sister Juliana, was holding a fireplace poker in both hands, brandishing it like a weapon.  Charles approached the woman cautiously, she was shaking, and tears were mixed with the blood splattered all over her face. As far as he could see, none of it was hers.

‘Sister Catherine, she… she bit Sister Rose’s nose off.’ The young woman dissolved into tears.

‘She what?’ Charles barked, already pushing her aside.

“She would have torn the rest of her face away,” the young woman whispered. “I struck her. I didn’t know what else to do. I knocked her out before she could finish.”

Catherine lay on a cot, one of the sisters tightening the last of a series of leather belts restraining her wiry wrists and ankles. Across her chest lay a rosary, its beads pressed into her throat, leaving raw welts as though the very symbol of God burned her.

Against the far wall, a cluster of four nuns trembled as they stared at Catherine. In the corner, Sister Rose sat slumped, a blood-soaked cloth clutched against her face. She whimpered softly, rocking, her eyes wild with pain.

Charles crossed quickly to her, crouching low. “Let me see.”

Rose’s trembling hands slipped away, and Charles inhaled sharply. The tip of her nose was gone, bitten clean away, leaving a ragged hole where blood poured freely. Flesh hung in torn flaps around the nostrils, and the bridge above was swollen and purple. The copper stink filled his throat.

‘She needs clean bandages,’ he snapped, eyes flashing to the sisters huddled by the wall. Take her to her chambers, before she bleeds herself faint. Now, do you hear me!?”

They acted at once, two of them helping Sister Rose to her feet, the others collecting clean cloths. Rose whimpered, clutching his sleeve like a child. “Easy now, child. God has spared you. The sisters will dress this wound and make you whole again.”

Only when the others were gone did he rise and turn back toward the bed. Sister Catherine lay unconscious, her lips cracked and bloody, working noiselessly at the air as if she were chewing. The rosary shifted against her throat, and the flesh beneath seemed to ripple, as though something pressed up from within. She began to choke, her body jerking against the leather restraints, and the beads writhed against her skin as if alive.

He began reciting the Great Litany as the bolus of flesh moved up her throat, smoothing the wrinkles in the parchment-thin skin under her chin. ‘O God the Father of heaven: have mercy upon us miserable sinners.’

Her mouth stretched open, teeth shining white icebergs in the black sea of her gums, blood still clinging to the spaces between them. ‘O God the Son, Redeemer of the world: have mercy upon us miserable sinners.’ Then her mouth fell wide open and Charles could see the bolus was a closed fist. The skin was pale, almost translucent, like the skin of some deep ocean beast, but the knuckles were obvious. He screamed the Litany now, eyes closed tight against the horror of Sister Catherine’s mouth. ‘O GOD the HOLY Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son: HAVE MERCY upon us miserable sinners. O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, THREE Persons and ONE GOD: have MERCY upon us miserable sinners!’

‘O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three Persons and one God: have mercy upon us miserable sinners.’ 

The voice that gave the refrain came from all around him. The violence of it knocked him from his knees.

The cot springs creaked and the mattress sagged under the weight of her. Her voice burbled with laughter, and something deeper, something older, spoke with her. 

‘Oh spare us, good Lord.’      

Charles watched the drool leaking from her distended mouth, the fist twisting, until the fingers could force their way past her lips. The hand opened and it was huge, the nails long, black, beetle-shiny talons. Her body arched, with the force of it. 

‘Call all you want, there is no God here, Charles.’ 

Behind Charles the infirmary door swung open. He pivoted towards the sound. Sister Juliana stepped inside, the iron poker still clutched in her hand, her eyes darting between Charles and the restrained nun.

Charles squared his shoulders.

‘Bolt this door, Sister,’ he said firmly. ‘No one enters.’

####

The convent was a tomb, icy drafts snaking its halls. Father Charles crossed the courtyard, heedless of the cold rain slicking the paving stones, and headed for the old catacombs – for Jameson. He took a candle from the niche on the wall and lit it with the nearby flint and headed down into the dark.

Charles found Jameson dousing the stone floor with soapy water. In the corner, pig carcasses rotted. The sight of their pale pink flesh immediately reminded Charles of the thing that tried to claw its way out of Sister Catherine.

‘I told the sisters I would not take any more sows. You don’t need to worry’ Jameson started.

‘Sister Catherine is… worse. Well, she is… I don’t know what-‘

‘It is a fever of the blood, from the sounds of it. I offered to see her, and you said n–’

‘-I think it is something else, James.’ Charles interrupted.

In the damp hush of the catacomb, Charles and Jameson sat across from one another, a single candle between them. Charles spoke first, his voice low, recounting how Sister Rose’s nose had been bitten away and how the nuns had barely restrained Catherine afterward. Jameson listened, his expression unreadable, then offered brisk instructions for binding Rose’s wounds and packing the cartilage to staunch infection. When the conversation turned to Catherine, Charles’s words darkened with talk of possession and devils, but Jameson only shook his head. To him it was not a matter of spirits but of blood, something carried within her, corrupting her humours. 

‘She needs a transfusion,’ he said flatly, leaning into the glow of the candle.

 ‘You speak of your disgraced project now?’ Charles huffed.     

‘You have tried everything the church suggested. Everything they’ll allow. There is an alternative.’ Charles’ jaw clenched and he dropped his gaze. 

“If I’m right, then her body is sick, not her soul.”

He already knows I am right, Jameson thought. He need not explicitly voice the alternative. ‘Get a healthy donor to give the blood and I’ll show you what modern medicine can achieve.’

####

Jameson’s gait was uneven beneath the weight of his satchel. Bottles clinked and tinctures sloshed inside, the stolen and the self-made jostling together like restless ghosts. Much of it he had recovered from Barnham’s laboratory, the rest were crude instruments of his own design. 

The vaulted ceilings and gothic arches of the seminary made him feel like a boy again, skulking through the orphanage’s halls, waiting for the sting of the ruler across his knuckles. We are all the Lord’s children, he heard Father Nichols’ voice whisper in memory, and he scoffed at his own childish discomfort. He had work to do.

In the infirmary, Sister Catherine was still bound to the cot, skin clammy, lips working in feverish murmurs. Charles and a young nun stood in hushed conference near the corner. Jameson ignored them, striding directly to the cot. He lifted one of Catherine’s eyelids; the pupil bloomed wide, the little rim of white shot through with red.

‘Have you found a donor?’ he asked, voice low.

Charles’s eyes flicked to the young woman. ‘I had hoped Sister Juliana might assist us.’

Juliana’s wide eyes darted between the two men, clinging to Charles as if to a lifeline. ‘You want to give her my… blood?’ Her voice cracked, a plea for protection.

‘It may… ease your soul,’ Charles murmured, though his hand shook as he gestured toward the fireplace poker leaning against the wall.

Jameson was already unpacking his satchel. ‘Not all of it. And not much at all,’ he said briskly. ‘I have devised a method to hasten the transfer. Fresh blood is best; she will need very little to improve her choler.”

Soon after, Sister Novitiate Juliana lay on the cot, her eyes wide with concern. Jameson and Charles had pushed Sister Catherine’s cot closer to Juliana’s. Now they stood in the small space between the two cots, Jameson’s tools on a small table between them. Charles glanced at Juliana, noting how her wide eyes never left Catherine, as though she were afraid to take her eyes off of her.

‘You are doing a wonderful kindness for the Church, for the Sister.” Charles added. “We will be forever grateful.’ Charles smiled down at her. 

‘I don’t need any favor but the Lord’s, Father.’ The words, intended as a firm proclamation of faith, quivered like a candle in a draught.

‘Of course, Sister.’ Charles nodded. Bravery isn’t the absence of fear, he thought, it’s sitting with it. And here was Juliana, a girl in the habit of a novice, showing the steel of a seasoned Sister.

Jameson rifled through the stolen medical bag until he found what he was looking for. He carried the glass bottle over to the Novitiate, tilting her head back and tipping the tincture of opium into her mouth.

‘It is powerful warm, like a heavy ale.’ She was raised slightly by pillows but her head was already lolling.

‘That is the alcohol.’ Jameson told her patiently.  ‘Two more draughts, just like that please.’  He pressed the bottle into her hand and the woman complied. Jameson watched as the drug took its effect. As she went under, Jameson narrated to Charles who would have to assist him.

‘The clamps I’ve designed will let me connect the donor to the recipient, supporting an almost instant transfer, the fresher the blood, the better the outcome.’ Jameson set the bladder on the small table and turned to Sister Juliana. He made a swift incision with the phleam, in a large artery just above the bend in her elbow. Next, he worked in the clamp. His movements were swift and sure, despite the hot blood pouring over his hands. 

Jameson grinned. ‘All the pig deaths are worth it — you’re about to witness genius at work.’

Charles shot him a hard look.

Jameson inserted the tube into the clamp on one end, and into the bladder on the other. He opened it, letting the bladder fill a little. He turned the valve and closed the clamp on Sister Juliana’s insert. He repeated the incision and clamp insertion, on the other side of the bladder, inserting a matching silver tube into Catherine’s forearm. He opened the clamp on the Novitiate donor’s side again, letting more blood flow down into the bladder, and he began to squeeze, using gravity and his hands to push the blood through the other tube and into Sister Catherine.

‘Keep an eye on the donor, Charles. Especially her colour, tell me if she pales.’ Charles nodded along to his brother’s instructions, going to stand over Sister Juliana. 

Jameson estimated he had pushed approximately two pints of Juliana’s blood into Catherine. He leant down and observed the afflicted sister, who had remained remarkably quiet since her daemonic outburst. Her skin stretched over her skull, thin as parchment, brittle-looking. Her colour had not improved. He reached up and lifted one of her eyelids. Her pupils were wide, staring black voids but somehow he felt watched, as if the darkness in them were alive. 

It was then she took on a strange, serene expression, as if some private satisfaction rippled through her, with her lips curling into the faintest smile.

Then Juliana’s body jolted. 

Her back arched hard against the cot, arms snapping stiff, legs kicking. The tools rattled on the table as her whole frame convulsed without warning.

Charles’s blood ran cold and he stumbled back. The Novitiate’s teeth gnashed together, foam flecking at the corners of her mouth, her wide eyes rolling back to the whites. Her spasms jostled the clamp and tube, blood spattering across the floor in a crimson spray.

‘Jameson!’ Charles’ voice was high and tight with panic. ‘Stop this.’ Blood was rushing from Juliana through the cauld iron silver tubing, fast enough to fill the room with a wet gurgling susurration.

Then, horribly, Juliana sagged, as if the strength was being pulled from her bones. Her skin seemed to loosen across her face, slackening, her cheeks hollowing so quickly her eyes bulged grotesquely from their sockets. Her mouth opened and closed, a fish starving for air.

‘Father…’ Her voice was broken, wet, gurgling. ‘Help me… please.’

Charles froze, transfixed by the sight. The line shivered, and it was no longer a transfusion. The blood was rushing out of her, pouring, streaming unnaturally fast, as though siphoned by some invisible thirst. The crimson overflow spattered over Jameson’s hands and the floor in dark rivulets.

‘It’s taking it all,’ Charles whispered hoarsely, terror gripping his throat.

Jameson reached for the silver tube connecting Juliana’s arm to the bladder. The metal was scalding hot and his hand clamped reflexively tighter around the tube for a second before he yanked it away. An angry red line burned across his palm, and smoke wafted from his hand, filling the air with the scent of cooked meat.

‘I can’t disconnect it-’ Jameson screamed.

‘My God!’ Charles staggered back from Sister Juliana. In the space of heartbeats she had withered, her flesh collapsing inward until she was nothing but a husk, a hollow skin slumped against the cot like the ecdysis of a monstrous reptile. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a soundless scream, her eyes dull and sunken into caverns.

On the other cot, wood groaned and iron nails popped as Sister Catherine swelled grotesquely, her belly distending, her chest heaving with unnatural vigor. The cot legs bent under her sudden mass. She lurched upright with a wet grunt, bindings biting deep into wrists and ankles now bloated with Juliana’s blood. The cords strained, cutting furrows into her skin as her arms flexed, fat with the pulse of stolen life.

The contrast was obscene, one body emptied into nothing, the other engorged, ravenous, and trembling with borrowed strength.

A rasping, otherworldly wail shattered the panicked moment. All the candles in the room guttered, their flames drawing inward toward the two cots. Catherine’s eyes snapped open, the black voids, rimmed with an icy, unnatural blue. Her lips peeled back in a terrible snarl, tearing the flesh at the corners of her mouth and revealing too-sharp teeth. She yanked, ripping free of her bindings and stood up. 

‘Redeem us with thy blood.’ Her voice was infinite voices and their power shook loose dirt from the stone walls of the infirmary and bottles of spirit, tinctures, and jars of herbs fell from their tidy racks, crashing against the floor.

Her voices broke into a fragmented litany, a chaotic prayer interspersed with curses in tongues long forgotten. 

Instruments, bottles, and phials clattered to the floor from the small table as the bladder, finally exhausted, sucked into itself with enough force to implode, spraying the infirmary with a shower of blood. The candle flames bent and flickered wildly, casting grotesque shadows that writhed like living things on the walls.

Jameson stumbled back, heart pounding, breath ragged. His eyes darting from Charles to Sister Catherine, no longer a woman, but a vessel for something ancient and malevolent, an abomination born of blood and despair. She lunged for Jameson, distended gut wobbling. Around him, the air was alive with whispers from his past.

‘Discipline is love.’

He remembered in flashes, the cold nights in the orphanage, the scrape of the ruler against his wooden desk. The sharp crack of it across his knuckles. The smell of spilt blood. The sting of the rattan rod across his bare thighs and the salty sting of his tears.

‘God is watching, always.’ She whispered, her charnel breath hot against his face as she wrapped her fat hands around Jameson’s neck and squeezed. 

Black spots exploded in his vision as her grip tightened. Charles lunged forward to restrain her, seizing her by the shoulders and hauling her back. His boots skidded on the blood-slick as he fought for stable footing to wrestle her down. Around them, the broken bottles at their feet wept strong spirits and ether across the floor, the stench rising thick and dizzying in the close space.

She shrieked, the sound so shrill, layered with many other voices. With a single arm, she flung Charles aside with the strength of a demon unleashed. He crashed into the stone wall with a wet crack. Jameson clamped his hands over his ears. He watched as her mouth stretched wider than any human’s ever could. Something slick with blood, but corpse-white, pushed out past her tongue. It was a forearm, jointed wrong, ending in a pale hand with sharp black talons. The skin along her jawline rippled, then it split. Flesh sloughed in wet folds, splitting like a rotted cassock, Sister Catherine’s face and neck becoming a scarf around the throat of the pale horned thing that was wearing her. Its chest forced itself up through hers, ribs snapping like ship timbers. Catherine’s voice was still there, buried beneath the guttural roar of the thing climbing out of her, a keening plea twisted into mockery by the thing’s own throat.

‘Jameson, such genius.’

‘Ignore its lies, James! We have to cast it out!’ Charles had climbed to his feet, half his face a bloody mask. 

Jameson’s eyes darted to the spilled spirits on the floor, their sharp tang of ethanol biting the air, and back to his bleeding brother. He understood at once. The stuff was as good as lamp fuel,a fire waiting to be born. In that instant, Jameson made his choice.

Gritting his teeth, Jameson drove his shoulder into the swollen, newly-born creature that had been Sister Catherine, shoving her monstrous bulk back into the wall. With his free hand he snatched a candle from the stand, thrust it down onto the reeking splash of sprits, and in an instant flame bloomed like a scream.

The blaze took them both.

Tongues of fire raced up Catherine’s gown and over Jameson’s coat. A thousand voices screamed in agony as cleansing fire took Sister Catherine and the thing that had worn her writhed, clawing at Jameson, but he held her there, forcing her back into blaze eating its way through the room.

Jameson was swallowed in the breath of fire, the world vanishing in a hungry roar. His skin blistered, split, and sloughed in the space of a heartbeat. The hair on his scalp curled and vanished in a foul stench. Heat seared his lungs as he gasped and choked, every breath a ragged knife of fire. The agony was total, without limit, as though his nerves themselves had been set alight and there was no part of him left untouched. Still, he held on.

Charles, half-mad with terror and concussed, inched to his knees. He saw Jameson in the inferno, pinning Catherine’s unholy passenger to the wall, its voice no longer words but the shriek of something human being unmade. Around the two, the curtains and linens had gone up in flames. Charles staggered to the washstand, seized a heavy wool blanket, and soaked it in the basin of water used for bloodied linens. He dragged it dripping across the floor and hurled it over Jameson, smothering the flames. The hiss was sharp, steam erupting as wool and water pressed out the fire’s breath.

Jameson collapsed, his body smoking under the sodden cloth and the Catherine-thing slumped to the floor. His chest still moved, shallow and ragged, the smell of charred flesh thick in the room. Charles crouched beside him, weeping, whispering prayers into the smoke as the fire clawed its way up the infirmary walls.

Sister Catherine, or what had worn her, writhed still burning. Her swollen form thrashed against the wall, skin splitting in red seams as the blaze ate at her. Her mouth gaped wide in a scream that was many voices at once, a hideous chorus of agony and triumph. For a heartbeat, Charles felt the full weight of the thing’s hatred.

With a hoarse cry, and the Lord’s Prayer on his lips, Charles heaved, dragging his brother from the burning infirmary. The fire moved like a living thing, righteous in its anger. Charles’ cassock was smoldering, embers chewing holes in the cloth as he dragged Jameson’s burnt body from the infirmary. In the hallway, smoke choked the entire cloister. The rising voices of the sisters filled the air. 

Feet pounded, prayers and shouts overlapping as the convent came alive with commotion as the fire spread and the demon howled within.  

####

By some grace of God, or some cruel trick of fate, Jameson had lived. No poultice, no tincture, not even Barnham’s hands could have saved him; the burns had been too deep, too consuming. Science had nothing to offer. Yet still, impossibly, he had endured. 

No part of him escaped the cleansing flames. His entire body was burned. Skin had hardened into a mottled landscape of scars, tight in some places, sagging in others, as though fire had remade him in its own image. The cassock covered most of it, but every movement betrayed the stiffness underneath: the way his neck resisted turning, the way his hands could never quite close, the way his legs carried him in a halting shuffle. He was a man perpetually wincing at the memory of pain.

In a science hall or laboratory he would have been an oddity, wheeled out as a specimen, a living example of survival against all odds. They would have prodded, measured, written reports on the grotesquerie of him. But now, sitting within a Church, he was strangely accepted. Men scarred and ruined had always walked among priests and brothers, their wounds worn as marks of faith. St. Ignatius of Loyola had dragged his mangled leg for years; St. Bartholomew had been flayed alive; the martyrs themselves had filled the altars with shattered bodies. In such company, Jameson was not a freak but a man.

How fitting, he thought, that the one thing I spent my life worshipping — science — could not keep me alive. Only the hand of a God I never trusted could do that.

The seminary lecture hall was cold. Even at the height of summer, the stone walls of the cathedral-turned-classroom trapped the chill like a tomb and Jameson shivered in his black cassock. He sat in the middle row, his hands folded neatly atop the long wooden desk, listening to the priest drone on about the infallibility of God’s will and the armour of faith.

The words washed over him, dull and distant. He barely heard them. 

With one scarred hand, he idly traced the rough hem of his cassock. He was not yet ordained, but the black robes of a priest-in-training already fit him like a shroud. 

At the front of the hall, the sermoner gestured to the massive crucifix hanging above the dais. ‘We must therefore,’ he intoned, ‘submit ourselves to God. Greater is he, that is in you, than he that is in the world. Resist the Devil and he shall flee from you.’ The priest’s voice was strong, but his arms trembled as he gesticulated. His hands were a mess of burned scar tissue and a scar ran from his right temple to the behind his ear.

Jameson’s throat tightened. His grip on his sleeves tightened. A student beside him scribbled notes with quiet reverence. Another bowed his head in solemn contemplation.

‘Therefore, we submit. We endure.’ Charles’s voice carried from the lectern, calm, unwavering. But when his eyes lifted to the hall, his gaze caught Jameson’s, and for a heartbeat the rest of the seminary fell away.

Jameson remembered the stench of the demon as its flesh curled and blackened, and Charles’s hands — his gentle brother’s hands — blackened too, scarred forever from smothering the flames. Science had failed him. His inventions had meant nothing. Worse, his arrogance had scarred Charles in ways no surgeon could mend. 

Charles, standing at the dais, felt the weight of his brother’s gaze in return. His lips moved through the words of endurance, yet his thoughts were far from the scripture. He thought of Sister Juliana — her body convulsing, her voice choking as she begged him for help, her blood drawn out like a harvest until she was nothing but a husk. He had told himself it was necessary, that she had chosen the sacrifice, that her faith would redeem her. But in the quiet places of his heart he felt he had condemned her. He had let her die. That torment gnawed at him still, even as the crowd of seminarians looked upon him as their teacher, their shepherd.

‘Any questions?’ Charles asked the room.

Jameson lifted his hand. Charles nodded in his direction. ‘Yes, Brother?’

He straightened in his seat. His voice was steady. Measured.

‘What do you think Father,’ he asked, ‘of those who say demons walk among us?’

Charles did not flinch. ‘The Devil deceives us best by making us doubt his existence. This is why we must put on, at all times, the full armour of the Lord.’

Through the high windows, morning light sailed into the room as golden shafts, lighting the dust motes. That same light, God’s light, had filtered through the convent infirmary where the transfusion and battle occurred. It had glowed against the blood dripping to the floor beneath broken bodies, lighting the drops up like rubies. Jameson saw those horrendous jewels in his mind.

He drew in a breath, letting it steady him.

‘Faith is surrender. The relinquishing of earthly doubt. Only when we accept that we are but tools of His will, do we find true peace.’

Peace. Jameson tasted the word as though it were ash and honey both. His whole life had been spent in pursuit — first of God, then of medicine, then of science, then of blood itself. He had demanded proof, answers, certainty. And in the end, science had given him nothing but scars.

So he surrendered. Not because he wanted to, but because there was nowhere else left to go. Perhaps that was what had been meant for him all along. That his years of seeking were only a long road leading back here, to this cold hall, this cassock, this God who could wait until every other hope had been burned away.

Jameson opened his eyes. The rubies were gone. Only the light remained.

Outside, the bells tolled for morning prayers. Around him the clergy bowed their heads in reverence. Jameson bowed too, his ruined hands folded, listening for a God he could neither prove nor deny, living a life he could only endure.