A NOCTUARY OF TERROR.
Once more is the drawer opened; once more are the papers in my hand. The ink of my firm youthful writing has grown pale, and the paper discoloured, for I have not cared for many a long year to open a roll so fraught with painful recollections.
My present narrative is founded upon these rough notes now before me: they were hastily and briefly written down at the time, and too truly chronicle events to which I was myself a witness.
To proceed. Date back thirty-five years. I was a medical student; my friends in the country had placed me in a neighbouring city for the purposes of education. No authorised schools of surgery or anatomy at that date existed in provincial towns, and the earlier years of the student’s life were passed in the acquisition of general preliminary information, and in attendance upon the local hospital or dispensary, previous to his visiting London to complete his education. Still, however, in the principal provincial cities and towns, anatomical study was privately carried on; the great importance of this particular branch of professional education having led at an early period to the establishment of rooms for dissection, and the delivery of lectures on anatomy. In the town in which I resided, one of the leading surgeons rented rooms over the cathedral cloisters for the purpose. These antique apartments, part of the monkish fabric of the cathedral, had been fitted up for lectures and dissections. The narrow casements overlooked an ancient burying ground full of the decaying memorials of mortality. The time-worn Gothic carvings, the silent quadrangle with its spreading yew-tree, the dark shadows in the cloistered arches beneath the rooms, gloomy even in the summer daylight, gave a funereal character to the whole locality; and the nature of the studies carried on above becoming generally known, in spite of our precautions, the place was regarded with peculiar aversion by the common people.
In the present day, the advance of education, and the wise provisions of an anatomical bill passed some years since to regulate medical schools and to supply them with subjects, have much lessened these extreme prejudices of the public at large, and have entirely remedied very great evils. The practice of disinterring bodies, and the sentence of the law, which formerly doomed the murderer to death and dissection, accounted for the strong feeling of horror and indignation with which human dissection was universally regarded. People became so alarmed, that watchers with loaded firearms were frequently placed over the graves of recently deceased persons by their friends. Still the practice of disinterment went on, and a sufficient number of bodies was obtained, though with great difficulty, to supply the necessities of the schools. It seems now extraordinary that such a system should have ever existed, or that any young men of education could have been found to engage in the revolting work. But the danger and mystery of these night expeditions excited in youthful minds a daring spirit of adventure, and there were always plenty of volunteers ready to undertake them. It was not this spirit of enterprise, however, that alone actuated the student and urged him to a fatiguing and dangerous duty,—heavy toil in the lone churchyard at midnight, with the certainty of the roughest treatment from the populace if discovered. Higher motives impelled him; the attainment of anatomical knowledge, and the consideration and esteem of teachers and comrades always accorded to the hardworking and the resolute.
It was, then, on a wild, stormy night in December, 1825, that a party of students agreed to meet at the dissecting rooms, and to start from thence at midnight on an expedition to a neighbouring churchyard, three miles distant from the town. The party consisted of Balfour, young Fletcher, and myself. Qualified by my greater experience, I was the leader; Balfour was my second, and Fletcher was to procure a gig for our conveyance. I agreed to join Balfour at the rooms an hour before we started, in order to prepare a dissection which we had been unable to get ready before, and which it was necessary to complete for the morning lecture. Balfour was the son of a dissenting minister in the town, and had been carefully brought up. He was a hardworking, attentive student, but of a reserved and gloomy disposition. He seldom joined in the amusements of young men of his age, and consequently, though generally respected, he was not popular with his comrades. He was a heavily built, strong fellow, with a resolved and not unpleasant countenance, though his smile was somewhat sinister. A man of hitherto proved courage, I always felt that I could rely upon him in emergency. It had been raining and blowing hard all the day: the evening closed stormily in clouds, and showed no prospect of improvement. I arrived at the rooms the first, and, groping up the dark circular staircase, was glad to find that the fire I had made up when I left in the afternoon was burning brightly.
It was a wild night. The crazy leaden casements shook noisily in the eddying gusts of the heavy gale that far above our heads swept round the cathedral tower. The skeletons suspended by hooks from the ceiling moved and creaked in the frequent draughts. The dried anatomical preparations contained in cases ranged round the room, stood out in the waving gloom, and as the candle flared in the wind, glanced with grinning teeth from their glazed sepulchres. In the centre of the apartment, stretched upon a board and covered with a sheet, lay a subject for dissection. It was the body of a quarryman recently killed by a fall from the rocks. The dim light of the candle rested upon the solemn folds of the white drapery, and gave a statuesque character to the form.
As I sat in the gloom waiting the arrival of my comrade, a succession of strange thoughts and fancies passed through my mind. I speculated upon the probable aspect of the face concealed beneath the sheet—Was it not horribly distorted by the nature of the death—a fearfully sudden death—rendering a wondrous living tissue of organisation, in an instant, effete and worthless—a