Plague Doctor 4: The Surgery

The surgery creaked. Every board was rotten to some extend, and every shelf was burgeoned with jars, bottles, elixirs and nostrums. He locked the door behind him, and slipped the key onto the rusted hook by the door. Once upon a time, he could have removed the mask indoors, he thought, fiddling with the heavy cloak's straps and buckles.

But he had too many patients, and what they had could be lethal.

He held the jar in a tight grip in his gauntleted hand, the clockwork grinding away as the sentient water splashed around unhappily.

It was large, but dimly lit, and everything had something else teetering on it. A table was in the centre of the room, a patient face down on it. Stairs spiralled up to a railed walkway, which had a mattress at one end of it. The mattress was good quality, marginally less infested than his previous one. At least this one had the courtesy to not attempt escape whenever he lay down for slumber.

He put set a will o' the wax candle down onto the small side table next to the patient's. A spark from the gauntlet, and the eerie blue light flickered and danced on the wick. He had a strong suspicion it was made of corpse fat.

If so, he'd been over charged - corpse fat was a tertia a pound, and even that was a steep price. There was more than enough in the streets, if you cared to do the hard labour to get it off the previous owners.

The patient groaned again, and the bandages on his back twitched. Carefully, the doctor peeled them off, and the poultice he'd put on this morning began to crumble off, dessicated.

The eyes on the back blinked sluggishly at him. Each was roughly the size of a pear, and heavy lidded. The incessant flow of tears had stopped, fortunately. Weeping Sores were more common than they were when he started practicing.

In the flickering light, he picked from the shelves more ingredients; black poppy, pox root, blind man's eye, beggar's tongue and noose garlands. He loaded the mortar, and ground away, the eyes staring at him unceasingly.

The mask kept the worst of the vapours out, but he knew how pungent it really was, and the sight of the noose garlands being ground up made his nose wrinkle instinctively.

He spent an hour applying poultice, caking it over each eye, which shut when he came near. Soon, the swelling should go down and the eyes retreat. They disappeared after a while, but he didn't know how. If he had the time, maybe he could sit in a dissection at the university. The infected criminals were sliced at various stages of infection to get a better idea of the disease or malady that was to be treated. He'd go to the free ones for surgeons later in the evening. The ones for the general public didn't have them anaesthetised, so they could enjoy the show. Apart from being a little distasteful, it also made it very hard to see what was happening due to the thrashing.

He reached for some fresh bandages, and brushed a beetle off the roll. It landed on the floor, and began thrashing around as it struggled to right itself. The doctor tapped it with the toe of his boot absent mindedly, rolling it over while he ran off a run of bandage. As it scuttled off, he found the length he needed. He rolled his wrist, popping out the scalpel in the gauntlet.

The next hour he spent affixing the bandages, making sure they didn't get caught and that they remained on when the patient moved. They were, admittedly, the cleanest thing on the patient. The hair was matted, and infested. He had moles and warts all over the back of his neck, and when he spoke, thick yellow phlegm trickled out of his mouth - a side effect of chewing Old Tom, a filthy habit that destroyed the teeth, but better than smoking Old Tom. He'd seen the effects of that in enough condemned lectures.

The bandages affixed, and the water jar's clockwork full wound, he ascended the stairs, walked the walkway and landed heavily on the mattress. Something squeaked as he did so, but failed to writhe. He presumed it had survived, but he was too exhausted to check. Behind the mask, his eyes fell shut as he slipped off to an uneven sleep.