1905
Enoch quietly removed his boots as he returned to his room, returning the key to his father's workshop that he still couldn't remember taking for himself. Keeping his coat on he sat cross legged on the floor beside his bed and withdrew the dead rat from within his coat, laying it on the floor in front of him. From his other pocket Enoch drew a scalpel he'd swiped from the workshop before leaving. It was a strange type of curiosity, the sudden desire to dissect a dead rat, and not one that he imagined most boys did in their spare time.
He turned the thin instrument over in his fingers and looked at it with a strange fascination. He could feel in his fingers the same tingling that had been in his feet just minutes ago, as if they were guided by something out of his complete control. Some unseen force was pulling his hand towards the rat that lay dead on his bedroom floor and the closer it came, the stronger the feeling grew until in one neat swipe, he had carefully sliced a line right down the rat's stomach.
His heart thundered against his ribs as the twelve year old dropped the scalpel like it had burned him, his finger hovering right over the tiny lifeless body in front of him. He stayed perfectly still, frozen in position, and then he felt it. The same sharp jerk he had felt in his hand as it stretched out over the dead man downstairs. It was as though something was trying to leap right out of the rat towards him. After a moment he did something he couldn't have explained if he tried. Enoch plunged his fingers inside the rat, twisting and pulling at something within until he drew from it a tiny, motionless heart between his thumb and forefinger.
He held it up to his eye, his mouth slightly agape as he examined the gory sight while blood dripped down his hand. Perhaps there was something wrong with him, normal boys didn't do this did they? Not that he had ever considered himself the same as the boys who played sport and tossed things at each other in school. Even as he thought it, a tremor which he couldn't supress started in his own chest and ran through his arm, his hand, his fingers and into the organ between them. It was as though the wind had been knocked out of him and he groaned suddenly. He was cut short by sudden movement in his fingers. The rat's heart, that had been still and lifeless a moment ago, was pulsing ever so slightly.
Momentarily forgetting the need to be quiet, Enoch suddenly kicked aside his bed and all but pounced on the floor to claw up the loose floorboard. In a few moments he had retrieved the doll and the lump of clay, still holding the heart in his right hand. The clay had hardened again but with some effort, Enoch was able to pry off a small piece which, acting on an instinct he never knew he had, he wrapped around the heart gingerly and pressed to the wooden block that was the body of the doll.
Nothing happened. What had he expected to happen? That the doll would magically turn into some animal and start breathing or walking around? It was a hunk of chipped wood and clay with a painted face, inanimate and uninteresting. And yet...the heart had started beating at his touch hadn't it? Enoch scoffed and threw the toy to the floor with a dull thud, turning his attention to the blood on his hands and the dead rat on the floor. He thought for a moment before picking it up by its tail and carrying it over to his window which he opened with an elbow and tossed the rodent to the muddy ground below. He had just closed his window again when a soft knock from behind him made him turn around. The boy swallowed and stared, turning his head a little quizzically as the wooden toy jerked on the floor, its clay leg rising and falling and one arm waving in its joint.
Enoch closed his eyes tightly and opened them again, trying to convince himself that everything that night had really been a dream. But as his blue eyes focused again on the toy he was sure he could see the lump of clay hiding the heart moving on its little wooden chest. Somewhat hesitantly he knelt down beside it and reached out to pick up the doll. Immediately its legs started to kick in the air and its wooden head began to turn bizarrely until its painted face was staring right back at Enoch whose jaw had dropped.
"What are you?" He muttered, as if he actually expected the painted mouth to open and speak. Slowly he set it down on its very unpronounced feet. The figure swayed and started to totter on unsteady, uneven legs around Enoch's bed as the owner of which fell backwards onto the floor in shock.
Footsteps sounded outside the door and Enoch had only a second to throw himself upon the walking doll before the door opened and his father stepped into the room, holding a lantern in his hand and looking bleary eyes. He stared a little bewildered at the sight of his son lying flat on the floor in a coat and nightclothes with his hands pressed beneath him and staring right back up at him.
"Enoch, what's all the noi-what're you doin'?"
Enoch's mouth opened and closed voicelessly, unable to find any words to explain the situation. After a moment he gave up and just scowled at his father, hoping desperately that the wriggling figure pinned beneath his stomach was not visible.
"Get to bed, lad. Early rise...and take that coat off..." Owen backed out of the room, pausing to look suspiciously at his son as if expecting him to burst out of the room and run off.
Enoch sighed as the door closed and rolled to the side. The wooden figure's struggling had stopped and it now lay limp and still on the floor. He picked it up and shook it before placing it back down on its feet. It toppled over immediately and the lump of clay fell from its chest and rolled to Enoch's hand. Cracking it open he pulled the tiny heart from within which now lay motionless and greying in his palm. Dead.
xxxXxxx
At first, Enoch tried to pretend it hadn't happened at all, that it had all been some strange dream and really it was impossible to make a toy walk around with a dead heart. He even threw the doll out of his own window where it cracked on the pavement and was taken away by a skinny, stray dog. The strange tingling sensations went away and he no longer felt a strange pull in his gut. Instead he went back to helping his father carrying coffins and embalming bodies in his time after school, and weeks turned into months without the peculiar pull returning.
In October of 1905, his baby sister, twelve and a half years his junior, was born. She was tiny, with a head of fair blonde hair and squirming arms and legs that strangely unnerved Enoch more than spending time in any mortuary would have done. They named her Faith.
Enoch wanted to leave school. At twelve years old he could legally leave school, not that it was a well enforced law amongst the working class whose children were forced into fulltime work in factories at early ages. He had made no friends in the class of forty boys he shared a schoolroom with, despite his mother's hopes that he would, and he struggled with the drummed in repetition of times tables and spelling because he simply did not care. None of this was missed by the rich, meaner boys his age who had the faces of cherubs when the schoolmaster was around, his birch twitch in hand as he kept an eye out for troublemakers. As soon as he looked away they would throw books and trip the smaller kids and pick on anyone they thought were easy meat. Enoch, with his disdain for social activity and strange hobby of assisting with funerals and digging bodies, was considered one of these. Rarely did he respond with more than a sour face and a shrug of his shoulders. If he pushed back it would only earn him three more strikes with the switch across his hand.
"Ho-mun-cu-lus." Their teacher, a tall middle aged man with an impeccably trimmed beard and neat suit recited from the head of his classroom. He struck the blackboard to punctuate each syllable of the Latin word. "Repeat."
With one, well-rehearsed voice, forty boys echoed the word from their desks. "Homunculus."
"Good." Mr Allchurch nodded approvingly before pointing his switch directly at Enoch who was hunched over his desk looking bored. "O'Connor. What does it mean?"
"I don't know, sir." He replied and wisely sat up straighter in his chair when his teacher raised a bushy brown eyebrow at him.
"Little man. A homunculus is a small representation of a human being." Allchurch answered, turning away at just the right moment to miss a blonde, chubby boy throwing a piece of chalk across the aisle at a younger boy who turned in his chair and glared at his offender.
Enoch rolled his eyes and adjusted the sleeve of his school jacket until he caught the attention of the boy seated beside him who cleared his throat and grinned at Enoch. Enoch didn't as much as blink at him until the boy began to mime opening his desk and pointed at Enoch's.
Suspiciously, Enoch frowned and started to lift the wooden cover of his desk as soon as he was sure the teacher couldn't see. Immediately a great green frog leapt from it, causing him to shout in surprise as it hopped into his chest and started to crawl over his shoulder, ribbiting indignantly.
The class erupted into laughter, and Enoch felt his face grow hot as the same boy beside him raised his hand and called out loudly. "Sir! O'Connor brought a pet to class!"
"I didn-" Enoch started to retort, rising from his chair, his cheeks burning a violent shade of red before the loud crack of a twitch against wood silenced the class and Allchurch shouted over them.
"Enough, enough! Mr. O'Connor, that's disgraceful behaviour unbefitting a school grounds!"
Enoch's jaw dropped and he didn't think twice before arguing, which would likely only result in a more severe punishment. "It wasn't m-!"
"Do you think me a fool?!" Allchurch roared and gestured to the front of the classroom beside his own desk. "Now."
The rest of the class snickered as Enoch dragged his feet to the front of the classroom, his fists shaking at his sides as he faced the desk, he knew exactly what was coming.
Mr. Allchurch drew himself up to his full, and intimidating, height and walked around his desk with his switch raised to deliver a 'suitable punishment'.
xxxXxxx
"Not goin' back." Enoch snapped as soon as the front door slammed behind him, causing his mother to jump and drop a bar of soap into the large tub of warm water in front of her.
"Enoch!" She gasped, wiping her soaking arm off on a towel and casting a glance towards the fireplace where the baby was sleeping in a small wooden cot.
"I'm twelve, ain't I? I don't 'ave to anymore. You can't make me. I'll be a proper apprentice now."
Valentine dried her hands on her apron and pursed her lips as she watched her son limp stubbornly towards his room, leaving his pencil box and school books on the floor carelessly. He grew more short tempered each day now, sneering and grumbling when he was forced into uniform and sent off to school in the morning. Maybe it would be best for him to work. Especially with a new mouth to feed in the house.
In his room, Enoch slammed the door behind him and sat down on his bed only to groan and stand up again, rubbing his backside where he was sure the welts had already begun to bruise. Sometimes he was sure he might as well be invisible for all the teachers and the head master would listen to him. London ran on money. If your family had it, you were nigh untouchable, which explained the pretentious, wealthy boys who found it fun to make others suffer. It didn't matter now. He refused to go back through those gates and if his parents insisted otherwise, he'd retort that he already had more education than his father had and look how well he'd turned out. Whoever needed Latin anyway?
Something stirred in his mind and Enoch paused mid step with one foot hovering an inch above the floorboards. Latin. What was the word he was trying to remember? It was tugging at the corners of his mind and the tip of his tongue but he couldn't catch it. Maybe he'd been hit so hard it had affected his memory. He scoffed at the thought and moved over to his window.
A cat screeched somewhere as Enoch opened his window and leaned out over the windowsill. Lines of washing hung to dry stretched between windows, though he sometimes wondered how anything ever completely dried outside. On the street below a few horse drawn wagons passed, the hooves clipping rhythmically on the cobblestones as they pulled their heavy load of bricks and clay through town. Clay. That was it. Enoch quickly pulled himself back inside and dropped to his knees beside his bed. He pushed it aside with his shoulder and once again pried up the loose board.
Homunculus. That was the word he'd been thinking of. Little man.
Withdrawing the lump of solid clay that was almost brick itself now, Enoch smiled to himself. What if it hadn't been a dream at all?
With a great deal of pushing, prying, and soaking it in water, the clay was eventually usable again, even if he had had to resort to smashing it into smaller pieces. Enoch left his room only to eat when he was called. It was a miserable meal of overcooked, chalky sausages and watery potatoes which Enoch did not think twice of when, to his immense relief, his father did not fight hard to stop him leaving school. On the contrary, Owen O'Connor seemed pleased with his son.
"It'll be 'andy to be able to properly train you up now. It's your business one day, y'know?"
As soon as he could be excused, Enoch returned to his room and set to work. He twisted and rolled the clay around in his hands where it stuck to his skin in clumps and dust as he tried to fashion a thin, humanoid torso. To this he attached crude legs and arms and a rounded ball of clay for a head, pressing each piece until it stuck to the rest. It was a very simple, crude creation which stood barely taller than Enoch's own hand. He felt a little silly making a child's toy at almost thirteen years old as he sat back on his ankles and observed his handiwork. It had been months since his peculiar experience with the broken doll but he had been struck by the almost irrepressible urge to see if the impossible could happen again.
xxxXxxx
The pigeon flapped helplessly with one wing, its other, broken one dragged uselessly along the cobbled road behind it. It cooed and warbled anxiously as it wandered around in the middle of a busy road, barely missing the hard hooves of horses and the busy feet of passer-by's until a boy in a black coat leapt from the seat of a wagon, bent down with gloved hands and picked it up.
Enoch had only a few seconds when he jumped from the funeral wagon, to pick up the injured pigeon, quietly snap its neck and stow it carefully inside his jacket where it wouldn't fall. He told himself it wouldn't have lived much longer anyway, and that really he was doing the foul bird a kindness. His uncle, driving the wagon, dipped his hat to Enoch as soon as he regathered the reins and drove off. Letting out a breath, Enoch hurried across the road to the front door and let himself in, removing his cap as he entered and not even bothering to see if his mother was home at all as he ran directly to his room.
He was caught by a strange sense of morbid excitement as he laid the dead pigeon on the floor of his bedroom beside his clay man. All at once, months of trying to pretend something had never happened just vanished into nothing. By all terms of logic it shouldn't have happened, it was impossible for a dead heart to beat again and more impossible for an inanimate object to suddenly come to life like a marionette dancing on strings. All the same, Enoch wanted to try, and more than that...he wanted it to work.
Retrieving the scalpel, which he had never returned to the undertaker's parlour, from the floorboards, he didn't hesitate to slice a neat line down the centre of the bird. It was like pickling an organ and he'd watched his father perform far more gruesome procedures and didn't bat an eyelid.
Reaching inside the small, feathered body, he immediately wrinkled his nose. It wasn't the process, or even the disgusting texture that bothered him, but the smell that struck his nose with a vengeance. Carefully he used the scalpel to sever the thin, bloody ligaments and muscle that surrounded the heart and pulled it free. It was larger than a rat's as he held it between a thumb and forefinger and examined it with all the air of an orthodontist examining a tooth, and as still and lifeless as the clay doll at Enoch's foot.
Now if only he could explain and repeat how he had made a dead heart beat again.
Closing his eyes tightly, he pressed ever so slightly on the organ with both fingers and tried to imagine it beating in his fingers. His blue eyes snapped open with a sudden excitement that deflated immediately when nothing had happened. His shoulders slumped and he pursed his lips. He was missing something, he was sure of it. Or maybe it really hadn't been real after all. No. It had. The boy was sure of it, so he closed his eyes again and tried to remember. It came back in a flood, and he remembered the peculiar twisting in his body he'd felt as he stretched his hand out over the dead man and the dead rat. It wasn't something he'd thought of at all, it was something he'd felt. When he'd held the rat's heart out in his hands it was as if something inside him was making a connection with it. A connection that had expelled itself in a tremor that begun from his own chest.
Feel it.
Enoch took a deep breath and tightened his fingers around the tiny organ and tried to solely focus on the feeling of holding it in his fingers. Like he was memorising every tiny little ventricle and identifying each bump and smooth surface with his fingertips.
And then it happened.
In a burst of energy that left him breathless, a harsh tremor erupted from his chest and travelled through his outstretched arm. It escaped at his fingertips and after a moment of wide eyed staring, the little heart began to throb, expelling drops of blood over Enoch's hand.
Momentarily stunned into silence and unable to move his limbs, Enoch just stared, his jaw dropped and his eyes wider than ever. In a second he snapped out of it, seized the clay man with little care and cracked open its chest. None too gently he forced the still beating heart inside, with some difficulty given it's slightly too large size. Within moments, the figure began to feebly twitch and jerk in Enoch's hand causing him to drop it to the floor where it writhed and struggled to sit itself up.
Enoch laughed and fell backwards onto the floor from where he had perched on his knees. His eyes remained glued to the little clay man that was now picking itself up off the floor and tottering towards him. He had done it. He, Enoch O'Connor, had made that strange, humanoid creature and given it life. It should have been impossible and yet the proof was pulling at his trouser leg and waving a little clay arm up at him.
Slowly, Enoch lowered his legs until he was sitting cross legged on the floor and, with a look of entranced curiosity, held out his hand, palm up on the floor. After a few seconds, the clay man swivelled its head up to Enoch and hopped right onto his hand. It was surreal. He was sure at any moment that it would keel over and fall lifeless again but the heart, which he could still see through cracks in poorly compressed clay, appeared as strong as it would have been inside the bird.
"Homunculus." He murmured to himself, lifting the figure level with his face as a smile started to twist across his lips. Why would he need friends now he could make his own?
"Enoch!"
Enoch jumped up, tossing his newly animated doll to his bed where it rolled and tripped over itself trying to stand on the softer surface. The boy hurried to the door, threw it open and rushed out onto the landing, hoping to answer his mother before she'd knock on his door.
"Yes?"
"I need you to get these..." Valentine called up, holding up a scrap of paper in one hand and cradling a sobbing Faith in the other. Her hair was bedraggled and a little damp, and she looked more exhausted than ever. Enoch could hardly think of a reason to argue, though the last thing he wanted to do was his mother's shopping.
She seemed to take his silence as argument enough and sighed, shifting the baby up over her shoulder and gesturing for Enoch to hurry up. "Enoch, really? Just some eggs and vegetables... or ye can nurse yer sister. Hurry up now."
"I'm comin', I'm comin'." Enoch said quickly before disappearing into his room again. He shed his black funeral coat, which was already verging on too small for him, and pulled his braces back over his shoulders. Retrieving a plain coat, he pulled on his grey cap, slightly patched in places. Looking over at the bed he darted over just in time to catch his clay figure as it stepped right off the mattress. "Got an 'eart but no brain, eh?" He mumbled and, after a moment's thought, slipped it into his pocket.
xxxXxxx
"Come on! Out of the way then!" A familiar voice made Enoch glance up as four eggs were placed inside the basket he carried hanging at his side. Occasionally, when his pocket would suddenly start moving, he'd nudge it with the basket to hide what was within.
Even through the dozens of people milling around the outdoor market, he could place the boy that had shouted as easily as if the street had been empty. A red headed boy in a well-tailored suit, and companion, a pudgy blonde boy with the face of a pig were elbowing their way through a crowd of smaller children clamouring around a man selling tin soldiers.
The red head's name was Spencer, and had been one of Enoch's tormentors before he dropped out of school. He strongly suspected it had been his idea to put a frog in his desk.
A hand was stuck out under his nose and Enoch started before handing over a few coins and nodding his thanks.
"I want that one!" Spencer had shouted again, this time snatching a solider in a painted green uniform right out of a small boy's hand who started to cry. If the peddler noticed the behaviour in front of him, he gave no indication of it at all and Enoch glowered through the crowd at the scene.
He was shunted to and fro through the crowd as he made his way closer. Moving onto the curb, and trying to keep out of a direct line of sight, Enoch knelt down on the hard stone under the guise of tying his boot. Slowly, so as not to draw attention to himself, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out the little clay figure, which was still just as animated and lively as it had been half an hour ago. It wriggled in his hand and hopped to the pavement as he held it out.
"Fight, whatever you are..."
As if it had known exactly what Enoch was thinking, the moment he released it, it ran unnoticed through the crowd, weaving in and out of legs and avoiding feet until it came close to the children. Much to Enoch's amazement, and amusement, it promptly latched itself onto Spencer's ankle, kicking its tiny clay legs and beating its arms against the offender who leapt and shrieked as if something had burned in.
Shouting profanities, he tried to shake off the unusual assailant, to little avail, until with a great thud and a squelch, he toppled over sideways, caught his friend by the arm and dragged them both into a great puddle of muck at the side of the road.
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