Week Three Excerpt
This one is a longerish one, folks. It's from chapter seven and is definitely VERY rough. I'm reading it now and having to hold myself back from editing it.
Anyway, basic premise is that Clara, our murdered prostitute, was accidentally brought back as a zombie rather than a ghoul. Philip, our apprentice necromancer, doesn't know the significance of this. Arthur, our mad scientist, wants to dissect her. It goes without saying that Clara isn't too keen on this idea ... so she decides action is needed. She very correctly guesses that, while Arthur may be paying Philip for his services, Philip is actually the one with the real power. If Philip doesn't want her to be dissected, there's not a damn thing Arthur can do about it.
Everyone satisfied with the scene set up? Good. Behold, the preliminary introduction of Clara to Arthur:
“Thank you, but Mrs. Hudson normally prepares the food in this house,” he replied coolly. Her attitude was far too changed from the night before to be completely genuine. She was up to something, he was certain of it. More than likely, she was trying to persuade him out of dissecting her through friendly overtures.
Unfortunately for her, he was above such tactics.
“Oh, don’t be all wet about it!” Mr. Stein admonished. “Seriously, try a roll. You’ll thank you for it.”
“I doubt it very much.”
Mr. Stein snorted and motioned the woman closer. She leaned in obligingly, her eyes wide in feigned curiosity. “He’s just scared that he might like it better than boring oatmeal,” the younger man stage whispered.
Arthur bristled at that. “Hardly,” he sneered.
“Then I’ll go get you a plate,” the woman returned with a falsely saccharine smile as she turned for the kitchen again.
She most definitely was up to something.
As soon as she disappeared from view, Mr. Stein leaned across the table and said with quiet enthusiasm, “I like her.”
Arthur raised a wry brow and muttered, “I noticed.”
“She’s pretty interesting to talk to, too. Did you know she made eighty clams a night prostituting?”
“Fascinating.”
Apparently, sarcasm was lost on the younger man because he chuckled and said, “Yeah, really! I mean, hell. If I’d known you could make that much money whoring, I would’ve done that instead of working with you!”
Arthur looked up sharply at that and noted the coolness to Mr. Stein’s smile. “We have an agreement,” he reminded the man icily.
“We had an agreement,” Mr. Stein corrected. “It needs a little revising.”
His eyes slid to the kitchen door, narrowing suspiciously. He was starting to think that perhaps he wasn’t the target of the woman’s kindness. “Very well,” he conceded tightly. “What are your conditions?”
Mr. Stein inhaled deeply and pushed back in his chair. “First thing is a price increase. Ten dollar for every rodent, twenty for larger animals. Fifty for humans.”
“Absolutely not!” he exclaimed. “Fifty dollars for a human body is absurd!”
“Mm… is it?” the necromancer countered with a tilt of his head. “The way I see it is this: I am in a position to deliver a unique commodity, that being undead people. As it so happens, this unique commodity is one you’re very keen to make use of. Without my help, you can’t do your research.”
“I was doing quite well before you came along.”
Mr. Stein feigned a thoughtful expression. “How many years did you say you’ve been at it again?”
Arthur’s teeth ground together as he fought the urge to throttle the man - or perhaps he should be throttling the one who’d put him up to this instead.
Still seething and entertaining homicidal thoughts, he replied tightly, “Fine. I accept your terms.”
Mr. Stein smiled, clearly pleased with himself. “Good. One other thing: I don’t want you dissecting on Clara, got it?”
“Now you are pushing it too far,” Arthur snapped. “I’ve been very tolerant of your demands thus far, but I draw the line here and now. That woman is essential to my research.”
“Doc, you said it yourself last night: she’s an anomaly. A mess up. Something happened last night and we don’t know what it is. It makes absolutely no sense to go cutting up a mistake.”
Arthur groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose as a headache began to make itself known behind his eyes. “Are you really that gullible?” he moaned. “Can’t you see what’s going on? What she’s doing to you?”
Mr. Stein frowned. “Clara hasn’t done anything. This is all coming from me.”
Bloody hell, that woman was a master at manipulating people! Not only had she turned Mr. Stein against him, she’d also convinced the fool that it was of his own design. Were it not for the fact that Mr. Stein was a bit of an idiot, he would have been thoroughly impressed.
He switched tactics, leaning forward with his hands steepled together. “I need her, Mr. Stein,” he said. He was disgusted by the level of pleading in his voice. “Mistake or not, she holds vital information for my research. It is important that I have a human specimen to study.”
Mr. Stein’s jaw tightened stubbornly. He stood abruptly, tucking the robe more closely about his body. “Well, you can’t have this one. I’ll find you another, but not Clara.” With that, he left the dining room, nearly colliding with the woman in question as she returned with a plate of cinnamon rolls.
She stared after the retreating man with rounded eyes. “What’s the matter with him?” she asked.
Arthur scowled at her and muttered, “As if you don’t know.”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t play coy with me. I’m not as foolish as our dear Mr. Stein.”
Immediately, her pleasantly confused expression disappeared. Her jaw hardened and a shrewd glint entered her eyes - or, rather, Mr. Stein’s eyes. It was an alien thing to behold intelligence in that all too familiar shade of blue.
“Are you always this disagreeable?” she asked, setting the plate down before him with more force than was necessary. The porcelain chinked loudly against the wood.
“Only when I’m double crossed,” he retorted, pointedly pushing the plate away from him. “You deliberately turned him against me.”
“Well, of course I did, dear.” She smiled, but there wasn’t a scrap of humor to it. “You didn’t really expect me to go along quietly with being dissected alive, did you?”
“You are not alive.”
She shrugged. “That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be part of your little game of mad scientist.”
Arthur gripped the table edge so hard it was a miracle the wood didn’t splinter. “This is not a game,” he ground out. “What I am doing is of great importance.”
His breath hitched as she bent toward him, putting their faces on level. “And what I’m doing is trying to survive,” she shot back, her voice deepening further with rage. “Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I’m not still human, Dr. Carfax.”
“Your humanity was never in question. It is your current state of being that is.”
They glared at each other unflinchingly until the woman withdrew, standing upright again.
“Look,” she said in a much more civil tone, “I don’t want to be cut open - again - and I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen. But I can’t leave here, not the way I am. I don’t know how any of this is possible or how it works.” She gave a bitter laugh and tossed an arm into the air. “Hell, I don’t even know how I work now. Besides, everyone that matters knows I’m dead. I can’t very well go showing up on their doorstep, now can I?”
Arthur cautiously met her stare again. “What exactly are you getting at?”
She released a steady breath before saying, “What I’m saying is that I’m stuck here. I need answers just as badly as you do. And I’m willing to work with you to get that, but only if you start treating me like a person and not another test subject. If you can do that, I’ll let you poke and prod me to your heart’s content.”
His brow furrowed as he thought it over. “I’ll require skin and blood samples,” he informed her.
“As long as it doesn’t mean you’ll be cutting me open, that’s fine,” she conceded.
“And you are never to interfere with my arrangement with Mr. Stein again. That is between him and me.”
She nodded. “I’ll expect the same courtesy in return then.”
“I’d rather not deal with him more than is absolutely necessary, so that won’t be an issue.”
A brief smile flickered across her lips at that. “Yes, I can imagine he’s a bit of a handful.”
Arthur snorted. “You don’t know the half of it.”
She pushed away from the table then, smoothing her hands down the front of her dress. “So, do we have a deal?” She held her hand out to him, her features carefully neutral.
He took her hand and shook it. “We have a deal, Miss Robinson.”