The Fine Line

Doctor Schiele sat shivering in his laboratory. Vienna in winter was cruel, especially nights such as this one. His eyes twitched frequently to the clock on the wall, at every lonely second or minute that ticked by. He shifted in his chair, checked over the surfaces, arranged every glittering silver instrument in his tray. There was a knock at the door.

It was a quiet knock, an illicit one, as if not to announce its presence to the rest of the world, but at this hour, in this most distant corner of the basement, the pathology labs were quite dead. The knock, quiet though it was, made him jolt violently.

‘You’re late,’ he hissed, as he opened the door.

‘It wasn’t an easy task,’ growled back one of the two shadowy men.

‘You have it?’

‘Of course’

The two shadows pushed past him into the lab, carrying a dirty sack which they dumped on the floor. It thumped dully on the tile, with an air of finality. The Doctor eyed it for a moment, pressing money into the hands of the men. Once they were gone, he looked over the sack again. He picked it up and hauled it onto the slab. He was a slender man, and it was not an easy task, but he laid it out and began to strip off the canvas sacking, peeling it back with a certain air of dread. He threw it away, that discarded chrysalis.

The body herself was made of blood-coloured hair and ashen flesh. He had her, at last, a subject. There she was, on his slab, surprisingly colourful for a corpse. It transfixed him, her chapped blue lips and fabulously purple bruises; the rich palette of death. Of course, he was no ordinary medical student, an amateur anatomist performing naïve butchery. But then, one does not need to acquire bodies in the dead of night if one does not have some interesting purpose for them. He found that he could not stop looking at her. Where had she come from? Who was she? A street-harlot, he assumed. It was not his place to know, he thought, rebuking himself. It was irrelevant; he was interested in science, and nothing else.

He turned away and began picking over the meticulously ordered instruments. He had barely begun selecting the correct scalpel when a clatter of metal on tile rang behind him. A long, drawn-out groan. Slowly, fearfully, he turned back to the slab. The corpse had moved.

No, of course she couldn’t – but she had. She was buckling her legs and raising herself into a sitting position. Her joints popped and snapped as she sat, turning to face the horrified Doctor. She dropped down from the slab, with a certain grace, her flimsy and filthy white shift crumpling into shape.

‘Good evening, Doctor,’ she said, in a voice that had a harsh, scratched quality to it. His lips, understandably, could not form words. When he did not reply, she continued, ‘Dear me, have I disconcerted you?’

‘A little,’ he replied, in a barely-concealed gasp.

‘Why on earth would that be?’ she asked with a calmly innocent voice. Again, he was unable to form words. She grew impatient. ‘Oh, what’s the matter? Am I not pretty, and witty, and infinitely more entertaining than your usual girls? Yes, I may be dead, but define death. Would you not prefer this enchanting corpse to a dead-eyed, still-breathing drudge?’

‘You are pretty,’ he conceded, uneasily.

She smirked. ‘Yet I bet you say that to all the girls.’

All the girls? He could feel cold panic tricking down his neck. Did she know? She could not know.

‘If I am pretty,’ she said, pursing her cold dead lips, ‘then why do you look so unhappy?’

‘I paid for a corpse,’ he said, after a long pause.

‘Oh, very good,’ she said, with an out-of-tune shriek of laughter. ‘You’re just an angry consumer, who was sold a product that didn’t meet up to expectations?’

He gave a shrug. Inwardly, he was terrified. What on earth was going on? Was this some trick? He had to get rid of her, he needed the body. Besides, if anybody knew what kind of experiments he was conducting down here…Feigning calm, he turned to the nearest cabinet.

‘So, what do you do down here?’ she continued, in a cool and conversational tone.

‘Experiments’

She snorted. ‘I had guessed.’

He turned, clutching something tight within the palm of his hand. Keeping the syringe tight within his hand, he sat down. It was a lethal cocktail, enough to kill a tiger, and yet that seemed no guarantee. She crossed the lab and sat upon the desk. Then her eyes slid down, unmistakably, to the desk under which the syringe she could not see was hidden and back up again to meet his eyes.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ she asked, with an air of indifference.

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘The syringe. It’s in your hand.’

He barely had time to be surprised before the anger rose up in him. This had gone on for long enough. He was tiring of her flippancy and infuriating smartness. A murderous spark flared up in his eyes that would have sent any other girl screaming. Still, she showed no fear; if possible, there was even a little amusement in her eyes.

‘You must be very brave,’ he began, trying hard to keep his voice level.

‘Or insane,’ she offered, cutting across him.

‘Who are you?’

‘Who am I? I am your living dead doll, the one you’ve been waiting for. I am your creation, your favourite nightmare, though first and foremost, your subject.’

‘That’s right,’ he said, softly. ‘My subject.’

‘So do it. Vivisect me,’ she curved her lips around the words almost seductively.

‘I don’t think I will.’ The idea of cutting her up no longer appealed.

‘Why? Have you developed a conscience, Doctor?’

‘I am not a monster,’ he said, quite suddenly, slamming a hand down upon the tray and scattering glinting silver instruments across the floor.

‘Of course you are not. Perhaps ‘tortured genius’ would be more appropriate. After all; Tchaikovsky, Van Gogh, did they not all have a touch of insanity about them? They say it’s a fine line,’ she said, with a cackling smirk, picking up a stray test tube and twirling it between her fingers like a baton.

She had finally broken him. He stood up, knocking the chair to one side, breathing deeply. He raised the syringe furiously, threateningly, to plunge it into his own arm, perhaps, or her neck. ‘This will end.’

‘Surely it will. But the question, Doctor Schiele, is how?’