Wordsworth Magazine Autumn 2021

stone walls of the Morgue, the Doctor worked tirelessly. He was never employed as a mortician among the city or law enforcement, but rather a nomad of physiology. He sliced through the corpses he obtained with fine precision; his craft could be considered more artistic than scientific. Never were his subjects of study criminals or medical overstock, but rather those he “collected” throughout the years – friends, pets, and even citizens were his acquiescent cattle. Nevertheless, the Doctor was never met with resistance as the courts of the city never considered him to be fit for a crime.

Over the years until the modern-day, the Doctor’s work became more depraved and wicked: carving the bodies into fleshy statues or creating sinful amalgamations of limbs and tissue. One day, this hermit discovered something within himself, something terrifying. Choked by the veil of scientific advancement, the Doctor began refusing what little sleep he already obtained; he began searching for a constant source of cadavers to fulfill his sick pleasures. He began researching the occult and voodoo, but not for the magic, but for the bodily manipulation.

He devised a theory: “A corpse can be reanimated simply by connecting the nerve-endings of an already living human to that of a dead one, thus allowing the living one to ‘puppeteer’ the corpse.” Obviously insane and quixotic was this theory, though no one was left who would tell him otherwise.

After months of study and trial, the Doctor was growing into his ancient years, although he nay claimed boredom of his study. He became slow and weak, finding his sewing and slicing to be atrophying like the muscles he once sliced with precision and beauty. This is where he found his magnum opus to be: he was to sew himself inside a fresh, young corpse and to connect the nerve-endings to that of himself, effectively living a second life.

Now, this Doctor was in the market for the prime cadaver, and soon he discovered his perfect candidate: a tall, relatively fit man in his early 30s, he was olive-skinned with deep auburn hair and matching eyes. The Doctor found his method of neutralizing the victim via blunt force trauma to the temple to 155