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When the newspaper ran the story of the death of Mr. Grant Ward, Dr. Leopold Fitz knew there was something even more horrific behind the aristocrat’s sudden departure from the world of the living. It was with the mention of a Doctor Holden Radcliffe that Fitz’s chest tightened and his face paled as it portrayed a look of horror that had his wife almost going for her medical kit.
Mr. Ward’s body was found by his good friend, Dr. Holden Radcliffe, Radcliffe arriving at the scene of the apparent suicide after receiving a concerning letter from the victim.
“He had been sick, his guilt overwhelming him--”
Fitz had to stop reading then, the blatant lie bleeding through the story and making it appear more like a penny dreadful to the young scientist than an actual bit of news.
“Fitz?” Jemma asked, looking up at her husband as he stared into the middle distance. His heart thundered under his vest and her gentle hand and he felt like he might be sick.
“He did it.” The statement was barely above a whisper and Jemma’s eyes became shiny globes as they took in her husband’s face. Desperate to know exactly what was running through his mind, Jemma, her right hand still on her husband’s chest, picked up the paper that he had let fall onto the table. Catching Radcliffe’s name in bolded print, Jemma’s jaw clenched and she began to share in Fitz’s horror.
“He did it, Jemma,” Fitz repeated, the glaze that had formed over his eyes slowly melting as he blinked at her. Her voluminous skirt and petticoat ensemble ruffled loudly as she stood and at that moment it and the rain pattering on the windows were the only sounds that could be heard.
Jemma walked to the window, biting the skin around her fingernail as a cold wave rushed over her. Dear God, he’d done it and it had cost poor Grant Ward his life.
Three Months Earlier
Perhaps it had been fate’s hand that lead him to the pub that cold dreary evening or perhaps it had just been the chill and a desperate need for a drink. Whatever it was, Mr. Grant Douglass Ward strode through the seedy creaking door and ordered a whiskey in an attempt to wash the day away. The place was packed and humid, the rain mixing with the sweat that drenched the room, but it was loud, dim, and busy, not to mention filled with alcohol, so it was good enough for him.
He had earned himself a few stares--something he was used to at that point--most likely for his well-tailored clothing, the top hat he placed on the bar, and of course for his darkly handsome appearance. But as much as people stared, no one truly processed who he was, far too into their night of drinking to realize that the son of a late wealthy American politician had walked into the disreputable tavern.
As Grant stared into the honey-colored liquid of his drink, twirling his finger around the rim, there came a rather loud voice trying its best to be a whisper, failing miserably as anger overtook it. It was coming from the young man sat on the stool next to him with his back turned, making it so Grant could only make out a mop of sandy brown curls and a Scottish brogue.
“You’re out of your mind!” the Scot whispered hoarsely. His back was bent towards the older man he was speaking to and his fingers were pressed to the bar like spider’s legs.
“Out of my mind? Fitz, I’m close to a scientific breakthrough! This could change the world,” the man bubbled, his basset hound eyes beaming.
The younger Scot, Fitz, pinched the bridge of his nose as he turned away to face behind the bar, his eyes scrunched tightly closed.
“No, it can’t. Radcliffe, you aren’t close to anything but destruction.”
“Destruct--Fitz! You saw what happened with Agnes, with a bit more tweaking the formula--”
“I did see what happened with Agnes!” the young man huffed as he rounded back to his friend. “It destroyed her! Turned her into--into… She wasn’t herself.”
Grant saw the older man turn forward, his large eyes scanning himself in the mirror behind the bar as a haunted look passed over his eyes.
“But it worked, Fitz. It still managed to rid her of her pain. Obviously, it wasn’t my… best work but science is rarely perfect right away. Which is why I need you and Jemma. With your names and credentials, I could get the funding I need, not to mention have your unbelievable brainpower. I thought you of all people would want to push the bounds of science!”
Fitz’s shoulders tensed and Grant could almost feel the anger boiling off the scientist like steam. “I will push the bounds of science,” he seethed, his voice a red hot knife, “but not if it means pushing the bounds of my humanity.”
“Fitz--”
“No! You are done using me, Radcliffe, and you are done using my family.”
“You don’t mean--”
“I do. I meant what I said when I walked in here; I will not allow you to pull Daisy into your crack-pot ideas. Her pain is not your plaything and I will not watch my sister be put through what you did to Agnes.”
“But she’s the perfect candidate and it could work. Don’t you want to free her from all that suffering? All that agony? Don’t you want to give her the key to happiness?”
The young scientist scoffed. “That’s what you think you’ve created, the key to happiness?” He stood from his stool and swung his long coat over his shoulders, his face becoming taught with a furious pain. He took a single step forward, coming to stand just behind Grant’s stool, before turning back to his companion. The young man’s eyes roved over his friend’s face, his brows drawn together and his teeth biting the inside of his bottom lip. “You’re mad.” With that, he marched out of the pub into the gloomy London rain.
Grant watched the older man as he picked up his drink and drained the glass, his eyes never leaving his own face in the grubby mirror. As shaken as he must have been, he didn’t show it. Or maybe, Grant considered, science truly meant more to him than the man who had fled the bar.
As he stared, a dark thought took root in his brain and he became overwhelmed with a dangerous curiosity. What had this Radcliffe done to that woman the young Scot had mentioned? What pain was he looking to cure and had he truly found a way to do it? The longer he looked at the greying man the farther the man seemed to drift away as if he was falling into the darkness of a well…
The hair-raising scratch of a barstool against wood flooring brought Grant to the surface and he nearly fell from his spot when he noticed the man who had been next to him was gone, becoming a fleeting figure as the pub door swung closed. Without understanding what he was doing or what had come over him, Grant followed after the man, narrowly forgetting to grab his hat. He was swept by a chill and he could hear the cackling of London from somewhere down the cobbled street, but his focus tunneled on the grey herringbone jacket slightly ahead of him.
“Sir! Excuse me! Sir!” Grant called as the scientist rounded a corner into a slim alley, one he knew was a well-trod shortcut for locals. The man came to a steady stop, his head tilting slightly over his shoulder as his feet remained planted. Grant’s heart raced but his persona took hold, his shoulders straightening back as he adjusted his hat more firmly on his head.
“Can I help you?” the man asked, his accent bouncing off the walls of the alley before falling strangely on Grant’s ears.
He took a few steps more into the alley, blinking as the downpour cascaded down off the brim of his hat. The white rabbit was leading him further down the path and he couldn’t help but follow it. “You said you could take away pain.” As his lips moved water blubbled and sprayed, but Grant kept his shoulders squared.
The profile smiled before staring up at the moonless blanket of rain. “I thought you might have been listening.”
“Your friend doesn’t know how to keep his voice low.”
“Not when he’s upset, no.”
The downpour filled the pause, almost drowning them. Unable to stand the pitter-patter of water on stone, Grant moved forward again towards the man. “Was your friend right… or were you?”
“Well,” the man considered, still refusing to turn completely around, “that depends.”
“On what?”
“On if you come with me or not.”
Perhaps if it hadn’t been raining, filling the alley up like an abandoned well, Mr. Ward would not have gone with him. Sadly it had been. And sadly he did.
The air was as heavy in the lab as it had been outside, the door coughing up dust as the scientist pushed it open.
“Forgive the mess,” Radcliffe said, the words thrown over his shoulder. He began to light candles around the room, somehow avoiding all the clutter Grant managed to hit.
“I’d watch my step if I were you. Plenty of things around here that would be not so much fun to run into. Especially… that.” Grant sucked in a sharp breath as the arm shot out in front of him, stopping him just short of charging into a buzzing metal coil. He gave the scientist a wide-eyed glare, the man returning it with a small apologetic frown.
As Radcliffe began rummaging around the room once more, Grant took in his surroundings. The room was humming with the sounds of science, buzzing machines and bubbling liquids. His face twisted and paled at the sight of what appeared to be jarred bird’s eyes.
“What is all of this?” he shouted as a clattering sound rebounded around the room, the scientist having thrown a spare mechanical bit over his shoulder.
“This,” he called, “is progress my dear Mr. Ward.”
“How did you--”
The man flashed a grin, his face shadowed by the rim of candlelight. “You’re hardly a forgetful face, even when it’s only in black and white.”
Something in the realm of dread washed over Grant but, due to the chill that already permeated over his skin, he simply shook off the feeling.
Radcliffe, having found what he was looking for, finally stopped his incessant bustling about and landed in front of Grant, his hand gripping tightly to a vial. In the light of the luminescent liquid, the man looked rather mad, the white’s of his eyes a sickly unreal green. Grant swallowed thickly, his jaw set. “What the hell is that,” he murmured, the words tumbling out his mouth like sludge as he tried to take in the demented Wonderland he had walked into.
“It’s purely a prototype, but a rather revolutionary one I believe.”
“What does it do.”
The question earned Grant another grin. “It erases pain, loss, regret, … guilt.”
“How?” his heart was mimicking the buzzing coil that sat just a few feet away and the green vial began to swirl in his vision. With as much subtlety as he could, Grant filled his lungs with air in some attempt to steady himself.
“Well that’s the part I haven’t quite worked out completely yet,” Radcliffe sighed, falling into a nearby blue velvet high backed armchair. The item was luxurious and rather out of place in the dim windowless lab, but really everything in the room was unsettlingly unreal.
“Currently the formula hasn’t had the best reaction on the subject,” Radcliffe continued, pulling Grant’s focus back to the conversation and away from the irregular placement of the chair, “It’s doing what it’s meant to; it’s separating negative emotions and tendencies from positive. However, it’s leaving the subject with--”
“The worst of it,” Grant finished.
The scientist nodded, staring into the contents of the vial. His face suddenly became older and Grant noticed his chest cave in slightly as he took a raspy shallow breath.
He observed the scientist further and the comment came to his lips before he could stop himself. “That’s what the man at the pub was upset about, was it not?”
The man exhaled sharply, the sigh a strange mixture as it fled from a smile. “Yes. My colleague Fitz is rather passionate when it comes to morality. He and his wife Jemma are brilliant, some of the brightest scientists of the 19th century but they’re tied to this idea of good and evil.”
“And you aren’t?”
“There isn’t good and evil in my world, Mr. Ward. Just science.”
Ward stared at the oddity that was the old man in front of him. Something about him was wrong, like somewhere along the lines of his life something had gotten jumbled. His face was etched with years of worry and his eyes devoid of a connective spark. The only thing that shown in the wide, sorrowful globes, was the green glow of the vial.
“You said… you said that if I came with you it would work. What made you think that?”
“I’ve read about what happened to you, more specifically to your family. Tragic the way they died in that fire. It must weigh on your mind quite a lot. And I’m guessing by the way your jaw just clenched that it’s a weight you would like lifted.”
Grant drew his shoulders back and a single drop of residue rainwater dripped onto his nose from the rim of his hat as he ducked his head.
“With your help and your resources, I believe I could take that grief--or... guilt--away. All I need is time, money, and a willing test subject who has nothing to lose… and everything to gain.”
The basset hound eyes stuck into Grant’s chest, their firm grasp nearly making him lose his breath. But, as the eyes of the scientist bored into his soul, he couldn’t help but allow himself to be drawn into their pull. He’d chased down this man, leaving the safety of the bar. He had followed him all the way here and he had listened intently to every word that had slipped out of the man’s mouth. Once again, he felt he was staring down to the bottom of a well, but this time he felt he finally had a chance to walk away.
“Then I’m your man.”
Radcliffe’s face broke into a green-tinted grin. “Excellent. Shall we get to work?”
In the nearly two months that followed the fateful day at the pub, Grant rarely saw the sun. The four cluttered walls of Radcliffe’s lab became the visions of his days and nights and dreams, though they all tended to blend together. And yet, he learned very little about the mad man who slowly became his closest companion. The closest he had come to learning about the old scientist had quickly been shut away, the picture of the young brunette woman he had found snatched from his fingers with an angry bark.
Though he learned little of the scientist himself, he gained a clearer picture of the way the man worked. It was as if his bones and been melded with the same mixture as a tornado, his style of science a feverish dash to progress. But he was brilliant, busying himself with formulas and designs that transformed into reality, the materials of their existence morphed from his genius and Grant’s checkbook.
It was on a grey afternoon, though neither of the men could tell what the weather was like from their windowless reality, that Radcliffe burst into unbridled euphoric chanting. He leaped about the lab, avoiding the mass amounts of junk that littered the floor, as he proclaimed his success.
“You really believe you’ve done it?” Grant cried, his eyes wide but his voice skeptical.
“Believe I’ve done it? My boy, I have done it!” He gripped Grant’s broad shoulders tightly, his fingers digging into the sleeves of his starched white shirt before letting go to clap his hands together.
Grant breathed in deeply and set his jaw and shoulders. “So, what do we do now?”
“Well, you take the damn thing of course!”
This time, no longer masked by the cold wash of rain, Grant felt the chill of dread run down his spine. However, it was too late to turn back and freedom from his pain was only a vial away.
Grant’s single nod sent Radcliffe running to his workstation to pull the thin glass tube from off the table. It was glowing nearly red, almost like luminescent candy. The thought aided him in getting his hand to take the vial.
“To science,” the scientist toasted as Grant popped the cork from off the tube.
“To science.”
It should have occurred to Mr. Grant Ward that something was wrong the moment the liquid touched his tongue, but he continued to gulp down the vial’s fiery contents. He began to cough, lightly at first before his lungs were set ablaze and his whole body convulsed. Somewhere, far away from him, the vial shattered and someone was shouting, but he was trying to spit up his lungs and his brain felt like it was ripping apart. His spine seemed to be digging into the base of his skull as the brown of his eyes was being smothered out by his pupils, forming dark hollow pits.
Radcliffe watched in a feverish curiosity as Grant fell to his knees, retching and screaming as his memories ripped and wrenched themselves free from the emotions that had tied them down.
And then it stopped.
When Grant came to he was looking at the candlelit ceiling, his brown eyes bleary and tired but his chest suddenly light. As he sat up from the floor he realized how clearly he could think, his mind free from whatever burdens he had once laced into his identity but now couldn’t seem to recall.
“Are you alright my boy?” Radcliffe asked, staring at him from his velvet high backed chair.
“Yes.” The word was whispered but carried in the humming lab.
Neither of them had truly felt the soot-stained air on their skin in months and they welcomed it gratefully as they walked down the short-cut alley to the pub, Grant with a lighter heart than when he had last felt it. The two men celebrated with drinks, in the very pub that they had met. They drank glass after glass with buoyant cheerfulness, laughing and celebrating their success.
It was quite a while before Radcliffe succumbed to the alcohol's side effects, but they eventually overtook him and he fell asleep at the bar. Grant, on the other hand, didn’t seem to feel the effects correctly. He felt rather happy, perhaps from the drinks or perhaps from the formula, but he didn’t feel sleepy or out of control.
As the night grew dark and misty, he decided to call an end to their celebrations, waking his friend and walking him back to the darkened lab, careful not to run into any of the machinery lying about. It had been months since he had been to his flat and he decided it wasn’t too gloomy of a night to walk home. Buttoning his coat tightly around himself and adjusting his top hat, Grant began his stroll down the cobbled street, catching the mist in the lamplight. It was then that his head began to hurt, his brain pounding on the walls of his skull. Perhaps, he thought, the alcohol was finally settling upon him. His vision grew fuzzy, dark spots appearing in the cityscape ahead of him. He leaned against an alley wall, wishing himself to not be sick before the world went black and Mr. Grant Ward lost control.
Mr. Hive breathed in the London fog and cut himself a smile. The flames of the lamplight gleamed in the well like pits of his eyes as he looked down the darkened alley ahead of him. It was quite the lovely night for a walk.
He could hear laughter coming from around the corner and the sound made his heart pound happily in his chest as his vision tinted the shade of fire. A lovely walk indeed.
Grant awoke in his own bed without the slightest clue of how he got there. The drinks of the previous night must have taken control, leaving their mark of a pounding in his head. He rubbed his temples and tried to focus on anything other than the taste of morning in his mouth and the swarm of wasps buzzing around in his head. Making his way to his wardrobe, even the feeling of his feet hitting the floor hurt his mind and he grimaced with every step.
At the sight of blood on his white linen shirt, however, the pounding in his head diminished, his heart stopping mid-beat. Quickly, he checked himself for cuts, anything to make the blood his. But it wasn’t and he knew it… he felt it. A voice nagged at the back of his brain, tugging on the bell’s rope as if alerting Grant of his presence.
“No,” he whispered into his empty room. He dashed about for a fresh shirt, a change of clothes, his stomach flipping horribly as he stripped himself of the red and white piece of clothing.
When he was dressed, he ran as quickly as he could to Radcliffe’s. There had to be a way to fix this. There had to be. There wasn’t. Grant shook his head as he flew down the street, only stopping when he nearly ran over a small boy selling newspapers.
Seeing the headline, his body went cold. YOUNG WOMAN MURDERED IN WHITECHAPEL. Dread rushed through Grant’s body and pushed him to buy a paper. When he found the details of the grisly murder whatever doubt was left in his head fell away. He had done it… or someone within him had.
Throwing the paper in the rushing gutter, he continued his hasty journey to the lab without any further stops. When he pushed open the door, the sounds of shouting hit his ears. Two Glaswegian accents were warring with one another.
“--to stay away from Daisy and then I hear you’ve called upon our house!” Fitz shouted, his voice a thunderclap in the confines of the room.
“You don’t understand, Fitz! I’ve done it this time! I’ve truly done it!”
“You think I care about your experiment? You think I give a damn about what you think you’ve done? You are a parasite, Radcliffe; a selfish plague! You killed the love of your life on a hunch, subjecting her to a nightmare of a life; one of hurting everyone she held dear and yet you want to do it again to someone else! You sent her to the rope--”
Radcliffe lunged at Dr. Fitz, holding him by the collar of his coat. Quickly, Grant rushed to the pair, ripping them apart before Radcliffe could close off the young scientist’s windpipe. Rubbing at his throat, the man looked over to Grant, trying to place where he had seen him before. However, he appeared to be too angry to truly care and stormed from the lab, but his words continued to bounce around in Grant’s splitting skull.
He had been right, the young scientist. Radcliffe was mad, fueled by his own guilt and left only with the science that had caused it. And Grant had gone along with it all, desperate to be the man he always wished he could have been. Crushingly, he had failed as much as the crumbling scientist in front of him.
“Mr. Ward!” Radcliffe beamed, his eyes working on glazing over the anger left from his fight. “How are you feeling?”
Staring at the man in front of him, Grant couldn’t bring himself to tell the scientist his experiment had been a disastrous failure. Even more, he couldn’t let the word “murder” leave his tongue.
“I’m fine. I just came to thank you. And to say goodbye.”
Radcliffe’s face twitched with confusion. “Goodbye?”
“I’m going back to America,” Grant lied smoothly, “Start my next life.”
“Well, the best of luck to you my boy.”
“Thank you. Best to you as well.”
Grant shook the scientist’s hand, plastering a smile on his face as his insides twisted, wishing to feel the resentment that the formula wouldn’t let come.
With that final goodbye, Grant walked out into the afternoon air, smiling as it started to drizzle. He walked to his home, placing his expensive hat and coat on their hooks, and stepped up the stairs to his room, sitting at his desk to write a letter.