A Blind Bargain

A destitute scribbler, Robert Sandell, ink-stained and hollow-eyed, staggers through fog-bloomed alleys while his mother’s lungs rattle like cracked porcelain; salvation arrives in the silhouette of Dr. Lamb—seraphic scalpel, Mephistophelian grin—who offers coin and cure in exchange for flesh. The bargain is scratched in candle-wax and shadow: Robert will submit his living body to nightly trespass inside a basement theater of rusted gurneys, copper tubes, and a single observation gallery where the doctor’s wife watches like a marble Madonna with guilt for blood. Lamb preaches transmutation, not of metals but of centuries—he dreams of peeling millennia from the spine until the upright creature remembers its knuckle-dragging past. Sutures become calendars; chloroform smells of prehistory. The hunchbacked orderly, half in love with the doomed author, smuggles whispers of vivisected dogs and vanished sailors, yet need proves louder than dread. Strapped beneath a skylight of cruciform moon, Robert discovers the experiment’s terminus: not longevity but regression, a forcible unmaking of the human story. Before the final trepanation can crown him with ancestral fur, the doctor’s earlier specimen—an ape-man stitched from circus cages and grave-robbing—bursts his iron pen, crushing Lamb into a red constellation on the laboratory tiles. The house of science becomes an abattoir; evolution howls in triplicate.