The Unholy Night

Chapter XII

"And the kids cried out, 'please stop, you're scaring me,' I can't help this awful energy, goddamn right, you should be scared of me, who is in control?"

- Control by Halsey

The funeral was to be the next day. 

"She makes a beautiful corpse, sir!" said the woman who we would now call a mortician. "It's a privilege to attend her."

This was an incredibly odd thing to say, but I suppose there are always going to be morbid corpse freaks and things like that. The goths of late 19th century England, if you will. 

I was trying to keep an eye on Lucy's "corpse," but Van Helsing always seemed to be right around the corner. 

We were vaguely aware of his suspicion of vampires. We just had to make sure he didn't catch on too much. It was one thing to have a vampire hunter helping hunt the bane of your existence, even if he was irritating and rude, but it was another to have a vampire hunter hunting you. 

Addy was to keep an eye on Seward. She had picked him over Van Helsing because she thought he would be easier to irritate, which, in all fairness, was an admirable goal. I picked Van Helsing because I was interested in a challenge. This left Bess with Quincy and Arthur, who were the least difficult to deal with, and so they were combined into one person's job. 

We would later regret some of these decisions, but that didn't happen just yet. 

The room where Lucy's corpse lay had become beautiful. It was covered in lily flowers, and decorated with some of the tallest candles I've seen outside of a witch shop or the sewers of the Paris Opera House. 

They say some weird shit about Lucy's corpse. Yeah, sure, it didn't decay. It looked like her, and Lucy was pretty, so I guess her dead body was pretty, too.

The description of her in the book of lies verges on necrophilia. 

I was watching Van Helsing. Addy sat on the other side of the threshold to the entrance to the room, watching Seward. We saw Van Helsing cover Lucy's face in garlic, and put a crucifix over her mouth. 

Later, we overheard something very different. 

"Tomorrow I want you to bring me, before nightfall, a set of post-mortem knives."

I jumped. Damn, an autopsy, we hadn't even considered that. An autopsy would make sure Lucy was dead for good. 

"Must we make an autopsy?" Seward asked, and for once I was on his side. 

"Yes," Van Helsing said dryly, "but no. I want to operate, but I want to cut off her head and take out her heart."

Now that was dead. That was very dead.

"Oh, a surgeon so shocked," Van Helsing mocked Seward, probably because of his expression, which, I would assume, was horrified. "Because you loved her, I suppose? I shall operate, and you shall help. I would like to do it tonight, but I think it best to wait until Arthur leaves for his father's funeral tomorrow. Once she's in her coffin, we shall unscrew the coffinlid and then perform our operation, so none shall know."

"She's dead, isn't she?" Seward's voice swelled with emotion and anger. "Why mutilate her body? We stand to gain nothing from an autopsy. Nothing for her, nothing for us, nothing for science, or even human knowledge - so why do it? You would make us monsters."

I recalled a book that I'd read some years before. Of course, it's all over the world now and widely considered a classic, so you'd know about it, but I had a vision of the two doctors hunched over an operating table, attempting to resurrect Lucy by unnatural means.