Whitechapel: The Final Stand of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF

gasped. The stench was unlike anything he had ever experienced, unlike anything he thought possible. He had become accustomed to the smell of dead animals in the woods near their house, and the spoiled food that his mother had forgotten to remove from their stores, but this was quite different. Tears formed in his eyes as the gasses stung them and snot began to drip from his nose down his chin. “Excellent,” William said, removing his coat and his hat as he glanced at the corpses laid out in his operating lab.
    Three dead bodies lie lined up on racks in the room’s center. One of the corpses was a docksman whose skin had turned various shades of blue and black. His fingers were outstretched and his face frozen in a look of shock. The other two were women, and they had been dead longer. Their faces were swollen, with fat, puckered lips and bulging eyes that stared at the ceiling. One of the women had a huge, expanded stomach, as if she’d sucked in more air than she should have and could not let it out. William looked at her and chuckled, “We had better get to her first. She looks ready to pop.”
    “Pop?” Monty gulped, covering his mouth.
    Each body was dressed as it had been when the person died, as if the corpses had walked into William’s office and laid themselves down on the rack waiting to be found. Flies buzzed around their bodies, and Monty realized that the smell reminded him of something he could not place. Something familiar.
    Georgiana.
    “There is only one designated police surgeon for this entire area of England,” Dr. Druitt explained. “He is hired by the police departments to investigate deaths that are, for whatever reason, suspicious, or undetermined. Those bodies all get collected by the police and brought here for examination. I conduct an autopsy and record my findings for the surgeon. He signs my reports, as he does for all of the other doctors who contract their services to him in this region. I am paid depending on the number of bodies I examine. Say what you will about Her Majesty’s governance, but she pays her bills on time.”
    Dr. Druitt pointed Monty toward a room in the rear. “I have a set of instruments in the specimen laboratory that need to be cleaned. I’ll begin here with the ones in my bag. You can also help prepare my specimen trays. Give me one tray for each body set up and labeled exactly as you see this one, which is already outfitted. Take it with you, and arrange the others precisely the same way.”
    Monty nodded, carrying the tray into the room. There were rows and rows of shelves holding labeled jars containing every organ imaginable. He passed a large jar of two dozen eyeballs floating in yellow liquid. Severed orbs tailed by stringy rectus muscles that trailed lazily behind the eyeballs. There were hearts of all shapes and sizes, each marked with a name and age. Some appeared healthy and strong. Others looked sickly and discolored. Monty inspected jars that held potato-shaped kidneys, jars packed with winding lengths of intestines, others with appendices, gall bladders, spleens, pancreases, and more. He twirled each jar, watching the organs move within their formaldehyde pools.
    William unzipped his medical bag and began setting his tools on an empty tray table. Monty crept to the door and opened it slightly, just enough to watch his father undress one of the women, about to cut her open. William looked up at him, surgical blade still high in the air. “Out, Monty.”
    “Yes, father,” Monty said, backing away from the door.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    After two years of working with his father, Monty could properly name and spell all of the organs and muscles shown in the diagrams of his father’s medical books without reading the text. Monty squinted, holding the book closer to the candle’s flame on his bedside table. He ran his finger over the drawing, tracing the branching arterial lines that travelled from under the jaw all the way to the groin. His prized