The Kettleworth Files
Yellow. Burning yellow. With a sharp sliver of black dividing the topaz jewel, the cat’s eyes slowly blinked in the flickering firelight.
“Patience,” Rufus muttered, half to himself, half to the cat. “Almost there. Almost.”
It had become a mantra, a holy psalm that spurred Rufus’s actions ever onward. It kept him going, moving in the dim candlelight when his strength had all but left him. Almost there. Just a few more tests…
Rufus Troyden wiped the beads of sweat off his upper lip as he stared at the dark purple scratches on the faded yellow paper spread across his study desk. The dim candle held steady as he carefully traced his finger along the lines that crossed back and forth like kingdom boundaries drawn by an insane king.
His finger shook as it moved, fatigue and lack of food wearing on his body. He knew he would have to stop and rest soon, perhaps eat something, but he was close, he could feel it. He had been close to a breakthrough for weeks now and every moment of sleep, every second of eating was a distraction, an obstacle to his work.
Almost there.
The process was working perfectly — exactly like he expected — until it reached condensation. The Lychtation Valve was letting the fluid condense far too quickly, for some reason. No matter how hard he tried, he hadn’t been able to find a single catalyst or reagent that would reduce the condensation rate without completely ruining the amalgam. He considered resorting to mechanical fixes, but he couldn’t think of a single thing that could decelerate the condensation without increasing the temperature.
A heated pipe, perhaps? Carefully regulated so that it would keep the Vitae warmer for longer? But the length! The heat! The amount of regulation! This Vitae was a temperamental beast, and Rufus wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, exactly. Whenever one traveled too far into the realm of the forbidden sciences, prediction was impossible — guesswork became commonplace. Rufus’s eyes flickered over his desk like an errant fly, scanning his charts and blueprints for some clue as to how to proceed.
The iron clock on the mantle struck three, and the lines began to blur.
The black cat watched Rufus as he stood from his desk, and staggered back towards the study door. “Patience,” he muttered as the cat’s eyes bored into the back of his skull. “Almost.”
Rufus Troyden had been lucky. There had been no one luckier than him, in fact.
His first fortune was the quick and appraising eye of professor Lymestack, a doctor and physician in the town of Kettleworth. He had noticed Rufus’s keen attention when ministering to his ailing father, and noted too the boy’s strong memory when he returned a month later to finish the procedure.
It was the work of a single afternoon to convince Madam Troyden to send her boy, under the professor’s patronage, to study the medical and scientific profession in Cliffside sometime after his fourteenth birthday. Once he had received his credentials, he apprenticed for only ten years under Professor Lymestack’s tutelage before the poor man succumbed to drink.
With nowhere else to go, he decided to return to his old home in Kettleworth.
His father had long since passed of ill constitution, though he would have died much sooner if not for the professor. His mother died not long after of a broken heart, though a flicker of romance in Rufus’s heart wondered if she had instead stolen away in the night to a convent, or perhaps taken to the sea, rather than endure a life absent her love. Nevertheless, there were two tombstones in the graveyard, and an empty plot where their house had been.
The second stroke of luck was Marsten House. An old banker had, through no small fortune of their own, come into possession of a large mansion, nearly twice the size of Rufus’s old house. The poor man needed someone to keep the house, and offered it at a pittance to Rufus in honor of his profession. As an old man, the banker refused to believe that there were doctors who did not live in fine upper-class accommodations.
Marsten House became Rufus’s new home, and with a small staff of servants kept the house and his patients comfortable for several years. He never quite fit in, however; he had never been one for socializing. He found himself thrust into High Society, and it was confusing to him. It took almost a year before a patient let slip the town was worried at his lack of a wife.
Rufus was no more comfortable at the art of wooing. Women still demanded gifts and artful choreography that Rufus simply had neither the skill nor inclination to learn. Instead, he focused himself on his work, alternately healing the sick or tending to the wounded, and sketching diagrams and chemical formulae that someday might make him famous.
But fortune comes in many shapes and sizes, and so it was his third fortune that Rufus found the Notebook.
He found it in a fit of boredom, while he was searching the attic of Marsten House for an old dressing mannequin for his maid. It had been a slow season for illness, and he had leapt at the opportunity to be of use to anyone, even one of his servants.
The notebook was old; decades old, at least. Its cover was dry and the binding creaked as Rufus opened the book to see the words that would change his future written plain in a firm crisp hand: Property of Plinkerton Moulde.
How had one of the notebooks of one of the greatest inventors of a bygone era found its way onto Marsten House? Had an ancient ancestor invited the notable to a ball, and he had unthinkingly left his notebook behind? Had an ancestor of the old owners been a thief, who stole the valuable tome from its place in Moulde Hall? Had it been a gift? An accident? A crime?
As interesting as the answers may have been, Rufus was soon enraptured by the book’s contents. Even being a doctor and scientist himself, he couldn’t grasp half of what was scribbled on the small pages. The genius Plinkerton had a style of writing that was, if nothing else, incomplete. Half-finished thoughts trailed into the middle of formulas. Half-baked thoughts that connected to nothing were scribbled in the margins. Small thoughts that obviously connected to greater and more important theories, but were less important, and therefore committed to paper rather than memory.
His fourth piece of fortune was Marta.
One summer, in a fit of what must have been madness, brought on by hours alone, Rufus had left his house to take part in a town festival of some kind — even now he could not remember its purpose. He wandered from tent to stall, nodding hello as quickly as was polite, and moving on, fearful that someone might want to speak with him about the weather or some equally confusing subject. Finally he found a lone and ragged tree to sit under, pulling the notebook of Plinkerton Moulde out of his pocket to peruse.
After a few moments of relative peace, he realized he was not sitting alone. In his eagerness, he had thrown himself next to a thin young lady dressed entirely in deep purple. Her skin was quite pale, and her black hair was tightly drawn up in two small balls that sat on the back of her head. She was staring intently at her own small thin book, her eyes slowly and steadily scanning the pages, flicking back and forth like clockwork.
Even now, he did not remember who spoke first.
She was as reclusive as he, and as driven. She wrote poetry of the most beautiful rhythm and melody that Rufus was enraptured. She too was fascinated by Rufus’s work, finding much to admire in his steady piecing together of the laws of the universe.
One day, in a pique of madness, he showed her Plinkerton’s notebook.
She was lost to the finer points of his notes, but she saw something in the pages that Rufus had missed. With her help, he unlocked pieces of Plinkerton’s genius that had heretofore lain unseen.
“We do the same work,” She said to him, “but with different metals. You use the blood and bones of the earth, and I use the meter and tone of the mind, but we both put them together in new and frightening ways to make something true and beautiful.”
They were married soon after in the Kettleworth Church, with few attendees — just how they wanted it.
Marta had been an impossible blessing to Rufus, and she died of consumption two years later, despite Rufus’s best efforts.
Time was running out.
Rufus paced through the crumbling manor house. There was only so long he could keep his work a secret before the Order would hear of it. They would come to his door, holy torches gripped in their lily-white gloves, and destroy him. His work.
No, he was being foolish. How would they hear of it? He had told no-one of his plans — there was no one to tell. Larson, the butler, had been the last to leave. He had closed the study door behind him after giving his notice, pausing only briefly to shoot a terrified glance at the cat. Rufus hadn’t seen him since.
Good riddance.
Rufus almost laughed. In the pennys-dreadful the madman always had some strange urge for self-destruction. There was always a need to tell someone, to reveal their sins for…what, redemption? So the authors wrote some fool friend who operated both as narrator and convenience to have their protagonist explain everything.
Rufus choked back a sob. Marta had loved reading those things. Even now, a shelf-worth of yellowed pulps sat crumbling upstairs. He had sacked the maid when she had tried to throw them out. Marta wouldn’t have stood for it.
Damn the Order! This wasn’t anything to do with any damned royal succession! This was his wife.
Rufus staggered through the hallways until he reached the sitting room. There, he crossed the wooden floor to the drinks cabinet, ignoring the grinding crunch as he stepped. Pulling open the doors, he grabbed the nearest bottle.
Empty.
Tossing it to the floor with a crash, he grabbed another. There was barely anything left, but there was something. He poured himself a glass and swallowed with fierce determination.
When he looked back at the door, he saw the cat watching him. She had entered the room silently behind him, and now stared from her vantage point on the back of a dusty moth-eaten chair.
“I can’t work magic,” he muttered. “I need to find a process that keeps the Vitae from…perhaps a means to infuse the Vitae to the bones faster? I can’t heat it…if the process isn’t done slowly and in carefully controlled stages, than there’s no telling what could happen — Anything from a violent exovitaeic reaction to…”
Rufus looked at the cat, as though expecting some answer or solution to his problem. Unwilling to fulfill this role, the cat’s tail twitched as it stared at him, perched like the gargoyle on the Kettleworth church’s steeple.
He let his glass fall to the ground to shatter and put the almost empty bottle to his lips.
It had all gone terribly wrong.
It had been easy, at first. The townsfolk had expectations of a doctor and widower, and he could perform both duties admirably. Buoyed by his successes, he went to parties and balls with semi-regularity in the evenings, and maintained his practice with professional visits during the days. Most of the town were amazed at how quickly Rufus seemed to come back from his profound melancholy. If there was anything odd in his behavior, they said, it was in his strange devotion to the cat he had purchased Marta before she had passed. Most people, however, saw nothing strange in this. The man, after all, must have missed his wife terribly. It was awfully romantic, really.
After midnight, when everyone else had gone to bed, he would creep downstairs to the locked basement, light the sputtering gas lamps that illuminated his worktable, and recommence his real work.
As time wore on, however, he found himself less able to maintain appearances. Rumors of his strange behavior began to spread, and the once sympathetic looks from his guests and servants shifted to looks of concern, and then confusion. He left his house less and less, spending more and more time alone in the basement mixing alchemical elixirs, causing foul smells to drift up through the floorboards.
It had been Marta’s fault, really. She had shown him the way. She had unlocked Plinkerton’s genius, and then it was only a matter of time. Rufus had found notes on Plinkerton’s Humanus Vitae.
He had begun his work the instant she had died. The funeral was easy to fake — no one wanted to see a consumption riddled body, so when the pallbearers came the coffin had already been nailed shut with a dead pig inside. They took the sealed coffin to the service, and Rufus kept Marta’s corpse safely in a sealed container in the basement, floating in Humphrey’s Preservative Elixir to prevent decomposition.
He had made such progress! His basement was riddled with the corpses of dead rats that had staggered upright only to die again in a few minutes. The process was not complete. It hurt his stomach to think about how close he was to seeing his lover’s face smile again.
Of course, it had been hard on Marta too. Poor thing, to be dead, to look down and see her husband toil so earnestly and yet so fruitlessly on her corpse.
Rufus took another drink. There was something. There had to be something. Some single tincture or catalyst that would solve the problem.
“Patience,” he muttered to himself, lovingly petting the cat and scratching her under the chin. The cat didn’t purr. She used to purr, not anymore. He wasn’t surprised, of course. Marta had loved the cat very dearly.
What was different? Rufus didn’t know. He had done everything exactly the same, hadn’t he? But no, he must have done something different. An extra heartbeat before mixing the catalyst, a moment’s pause before turning up the burner, even an errant speck of dust might have made all the difference.
What mattered was the rat. It was breathing. It’s heart was beating. It was looking at him!
The cat was staring, curious, at the poor rodent. She pressed her paw onto the thing’s head, and then pulled back again, to see if the rat would react. It did not.
Rufus liked his lips. “It worked!” He cried, clapping his hands over his head like a manic buffoon. He laughed long and hard, the weight of seven years flowing off of his shoulders like a silk cloak. He snatched up the cat and spun her about like a child. “It worked! It worked! The last piece, my dear! That was the last piece! Oh, Plinkerton, you old goat! I cracked your code you dottering simpleton! You magnificent fool! You gregarious ape!”
He was rambling, he knew, floating on the fumes of success. Setting the cat on the table, he turned his gaze to the mixture, the large beaker full of milky-white. It practically glowed.
He picked up the beaker with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics. Carefully, ever so carefully, he carried the Vitae over to the long table in the corner of the laboratory. “There, now…the body. Soon, Marta. You’ll be in my arms again, soon. Patience…”
Turning from the beaker, he moved to the other end of the room and pulled a long thick sheet off of the glass coffin that held his lover’s preserved body. He tugged furiously at the bent pieces of metal that kept the coffin airtight, fumbling in his excitement. Finally, with a loud metallic clang, the lid was free.
Rufus shoved the glass lid, and it slid off, shattering on the ground into a million pieces. The cat yowled in protest as Rufus reached into the grimy brown liquid that held Marta’s body. Ignoring the tingling numbing that crept into his arms, he gripped Marta’s corpse by the shoulders. Carefully, he lifted her out of the brackish liquid and carried her pale wet body to the operation table.
Were he some vaudevillian romantic, he might have wasted time caressing her cheek, or whispering romantic poetry to this empty vessel, this soulless corpse. The only words that passed his lips: “Almost there. Almost…”
He did pause, however, once the dead body was strapped to the table. He knew that this was the moment he would find most troubling, for the revitalizer needed to be infused from the inside of the body. It was a gristly process, but it had to be done. Staring at his pale lover’s corpse, he reached for a razor-sharp knife and began to cut.
Time wore on into the night. Outside, a thunderstorm brewed into a rage, battering his estate like an eager house-guest. Elixirs and infusions were injected, mixed, and poured in ever increasingly complicated patterns. Sometimes, Rufus cried in horror at what his hands were doing to the body of his beloved. Other times, he couldn’t stop himself from laughing. Blood caked his arms as he grabbed clamps and scalpels, redesigning his lovers innards like an engineer.
And throughout the process, he filled her muscles, her bones, her organs with the glowing white Vitae.
Finally, the work was done. Rufus cut the thread of the final stitch, sealing the body up again. Only now did he pause, looking at the once smooth skin of his lover, lying there on the table. She shone in his eyes, glittering like silver in the dim laboratory light. The horror of what he had done faded away as he stared at her placid face.
“Almost.”
Rufus began to pull long winding wires from the Jar of Lightning that sat silently on the floor and carefully push the sharp ends into her scalp and wrists. Just like a puppet, Rufus thought, his mind drunk with anticipation. Slowly, he reached his shaking hand down to the switch on top of the jar. With a dreamlike calm, he toggled the switch open.
The corpse convulsed with a rapid clattering noise, quivering like it was ill. After a few short seconds, Rufus twisted the switch again, cutting the energy to the body, and it grew still.
Rufus clasped his hands.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, the body convulsed again. With a sharp spasm, the body flung itself against the straps as brackish liquid expelled itself from lungs and throat. For a moment, the body was bedlam.
Then, it was still.
Slowly, scarcely breathing, Rufus stepped forward. The body was limp, still empty, but now…now!
It was breathing!
He could see her chest rise and fall, slowly and steadily. He reached out to take her wrist in his hand, and yes! Her heart was beating!
She was alive!
Rufus pulled his hands away. No. She was not alive. Marta was still dead. This was still nothing more than a body. There was still one final thing to do; he had to return Marta to her body, and then…
A sudden knocking echoed throughout the mansion.
Rufus spun about, his brain swirling in confusion and disbelief. There was someone at the front door!
How did they get past the locked gate? A moments thought and he was certain — the Order had finally come for him! In a panic, he leapt across the room to pull another sheet off of an elaborate machine, covered with levers and dials. Frantically he began twisting and pulling at the controls. He had to finish! He had to put Marta’s mind back in her body before the Order found him!
The part of his brain that was not consumed with saving his wife from death wondered if he thought to lock the door. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he had left the mansion, let alone used the front door. The knocking became loud and rhythmic — they were breaking the door down. He must have locked it. Bolted it, too.
He dragged the heavy machine to Marta’s body, fitting one end of a long apparatus to her head. He couldn’t rush things. Plinkerton’s notebook had been very clear; if the positioning was even a centimeter off, the whole process could be ruined. Marta would be lost forever…
The sound of splintering wood echoed from above, and loud foot-falls scattered throughout the house like an army of rats. Rufus tore his gaze back to the machine, as the cat leapt up onto the nearby table next to the body, staring, unblinking.
Rufus reached for the other apparatus when a crossbow bolt pierced his palm, spinning him about. The pain was immense, and he cried out as the cat jumped off the table, vanishing into the dark corners of the basement. Looking up from his crippled hand, he saw three red-robed figures, their faces hidden under thick hoods, standing at the stairway to the upstairs. Two held torches, glittering with holy flame. The third lowered their crossbow, deftly fitting another bolt in place and pulling the thin lever that pulled back the string.
“How did you know?” Rufus gasped.
“Rufus Troyden,” the third raised their crossbow again, “you are found guilty of God’s Law. Have you anything to say before the flames of Our Father purge your sin from this land?”
Rufus stared at them. He thought of Marta and her poetry, the true and horrible things she had whispered to him that day by the tree. He thought of the Truth of Things, and how he knew that death was not the boundary the world thought. He stared at the flaming torches, and tried to put everything he knew into words to let them know — to make them see!
His mouth hung open, hit tongue was still.
“May his holy mercy cleanse your soul.” The crossbow twitched.
The soft thud of bolt hitting flesh made Rufus turn. Marta’s body lay still, the bolt sticking out of her throat as sickly pale blood poured out from its wicked carved channels.
The two torch-wielding monks stepped forward, torches raised. There was no mercy in their eyes, no compromise in their gait.
Rufus screamed like a beast, swinging his fists as they approached, but the flare of the torch flames blinded him momentarily. Then, the Monks were next to him, twisting his healthy arm to his back. Pain shot through his shoulder as he struggled to free himself, but he was helpless, and could only watch as the third Monk calmly unstrapped the corpse and pulled it to the center of the room.
He sprinkled her face from a clay bottle that hung at his side, muttering strange words as Rufus screamed and pleaded and cursed. He could smell the holy liquid. The Monk lowered the torch.
In seconds, Marta’s body was ablaze. His screams echoed briefly before the body fell apart, her hair twisting and burning away. Her skin wrinkled and darkened like parchment, filling the room with its horrifying smell. It was over in seconds. One Monk began to wrestle him up the stairs as the others began to bless the rest of his workshop.
“So close,” Rufus wept like a child as he was dragged away to be tried and executed. “Almost. We were almost there! I’m so sorry, I’ve failed you. Forgive me! Please!”
His death was not swift, nor was it painless. He was strung to the post as he was still weeping, the fire lit from his burning house. His cries were long and loud, a warning to all sinners to remain true to the holy path of the Order, and to turn your back on things better left unknown.
The glow of the blaze could be seen for miles outside Kettleworth, and burned long into the night. The Monks who saw the glow bowed their heads in holy reverence at their lord’s judgment. The townsfolk of Kettleworth averted their eyes too, but it was not in reverence.
Only one pair of eyes stared as her former life turned to ash. She watched the blaze, her face as easy to read as any cat’s, staring into the flickering firelight.
It wasn’t until the roof of her old house collapsed and the south wall fell to pieces, that she stood from her crouch and padded away, unseen, into the night.