15 NOVEMBER 1894 - ST. DENIS, LEMOYNE
Galen breathed out a cloud of acrid cigarette smoke, magnified in intensity as his breath met the crisp night air. He'd pulled a chair outside and sat leaning against the exterior brick wall of the medical office seemingly watching as the nighttime city crowd bustled about, but he did not see them. His mind's eye was turned back in time to memories that felt like a lifetime ago.
WINTER 1867 - LONDON, ENGLAND
“No, no, no, no, no! Stay with me!" Industrial accident by the docks. Shipyard ropes had gotten tangled around the patient's legs and dragged him into a pulley. These kinds of accidents were, sadly, all too common around this part of town. The blood had reached the young doctor's elbows, staining his rolled white shirt sleeves. Every beat of the man's heart sent another cascade of red through his pulsing, open chest cavity. His wounds were grievous but his heart was strong. A will to live. “Clamps! Hurry!"
Galen stretched out his arm and open hand in preparation to receive the surgical tool. He was dark haired and athletic, and his bright blue eyes flashed with ambition and determination “Hurry!" He grasped at the air desperately, not wanting to take his gaze off the patient. “Nurse, what is--" He finally turned to look at her, pale and quiet, standing reservedly against the wall. “CLAMPS WOMAN!"
Doctor--"
"Fucking useless!" he hissed as he turned away from the table and grabbed the clamps himself.
"Doctor!"
"What?!" Dr. Kane looked at the motionless body on the table expectantly. The blood was still. There was no strong heartbeat, there never was. It was merely the doctor's chest compressions that had caused the blood to flow. He'd been so singularly focused, he hadn't even realized he was trying to bring a dead man back to life.
His shoulders slumped and he exhaled with closed eyes.
"You did your best, sir," the nurse said with a soft Cockney tone.
"Third 'un this week," he muttered. "It's never enough, is it?
Galen pulled deeply on his cigarette, the hiss of the streetlamps the only sound on the street as the last of the pedestrians found their way home for the night. He considered the conversations he'd had that night, about the Hangman Killers and the Slasher. It made him angry. You think you know death? he asked to no one.
These killers are not tortured artists slaving over their canvas through fitful sleepless nights; no, they are circus monkeys wielding guns. They have so wholly bought into their own delusion that they are masters of life and death, that they ignore the cold reality that no one has ever invented more creative means to die than mankind left to its own devices. The killers' works are pale uninspired facsimiles. Do they think their works are more beautiful, more divine than war? Than famine? Than pestilence?
Kane rubbed his chin, now thick with greying stubble. He thought of the bodies stacked high in the Old Morgue, the mass grave in the gutter of the prison, the cold box stuffed to capacity in his office, and the blood-run grave dirt in the church yard next door. You think you know death?
Life is the most fragile thing in the world. It's not even real, not tangible, not provable. And yet, it can be created and destroyed, shared, lost, missed, remembered. Life is the one true currency of mankind, and time is the measure of it. These killers think themselves death-dealers, but they do not know the meaning of it. To deal in death is to know the value of a life, and one cannot know its value until they've tried to save it. There is no being on the planet who invests so heavily in death than a physician, whose savings is not stowed in coffers but in coffins.
His patients flock to him sickly and afraid, and they trade their coin for Time. The reaper will wait. Take thy medicine. Mend thy bones. Cut thy skin. Drink thy poison. Let thy blood. The reaper will wait, just pay thy toll, and I will save you.
I know death only by measuring the shadow it casts, by knowing the value of life. And yet, in truth, no living man knows Death. For to know it, is to become it. To know Death is to die.
You think you know death?
I will show you.