Autopsy of an Unidentified Creature, 1311 AD

a science fiction short story by Daisy Ravenel

The following short story may fill you with wonder or with dread, depending which side of the autopsy table you fall on, and which witness you identify with most.

Or it may do both. These are all valid responses to such a tale. One thing is certain though. This is an underside story. Is there anything more underside than the autopsy of an unidentified creature?

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Photo by Miguel Alcântara on Unsplash

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AUTOPSY OF AN UNIDENTIFIED CREATURE, 1311 AD

by Daisy Ravenel

“You must not perform the autopsy in the infirmary and you must not tell anyone.”

That was what the Abbot had told Agata as the box was carried into the convent. She directed them to carry it to the cellar, where only the convent’s spiders could play audience to what she had to do.

“Remove the heart from the body,” the Abbot had told her that morning. “Destroy everything else.”

Agata had bowed her head and assured him she would not fail him. He and his fellow monks had left her alone with the box and the darkness.

The box was old and large and its lid was heavy. Agata grunted as she pushed the lid to the floor, staring down into the box.

And then she screamed.

A few stumbling steps and her back was flat against the cold stone walls of the cellar, her hands wrenching at the wool of her habit.

She took a shaky breath of thick musty air. Remain rational. The Abbot had warned her that the body—the Subject, the Subject, that was what he called it—was unusual. He had warned her to keep her wits about her. She would not become hysterical. She would remain calm.

Agata took a halting step forward, holding her breath. She peered into the box.

The Subject was tall, much taller than the men of the monastery or the village below. Agata herself stood a clear head above most of the other sisters and saw eye to eye with the Abbot himself, but she was sure that if the Subject stood upright, her eyes would only reach its chest. 

That chest protruded like a bird jutting out its plumage to attract a mate. Agata raised her palm and traced it over the shape of the Subject’s torso. It was a proud letter D attached to a spindly I, tapering from the ribs into an unnaturally narrow waist. As Agata’s hand nervously skimmed over the waist, she began to imagine how the organs inside could possibly be configured. Were they very small? Squeezed into the tight space, intestines and liver and kidneys all coiled haphazardly around each other? Or perhaps they were located in that enormous chest instead.

It was with blood thundering in her ears that Agata turned her eyes to the Subject’s face, and that face felt like a dagger of lightning in her veins.

If asked, by the Abbot or by any of the sisters, she would not have been able to describe the face’s features. The curve of its jawline, the shape of its nose, the position of its brow—all of these details fell from her memory the moment she looked away, replaced only by the knowledge that what she had seen burned her eyes like staring into the sun.

Under the thick wool of her sleeve, Agata felt each hair on her arm stand on end. What—no, who—was this, spread out on her table? 

Her apprentice had not yet arrived to take notes, so without a helper to record her findings, Agata stepped away from the box. She had bristled that morning when the Abbot assigned the task of assisting her to young Sister Lucia instead of one of the brothers. 

For years, Agata herself had stood behind the backs of Brother Renaldus and Brother Iacomo, meticulously noting everything they spoke aloud down on a wax tablet. The Abbot allowed her to visit his own private library, to read Galen and al-Razi’s writings on anatomy while his fingers splayed across her shoulders.

“You must understand, Sister,” the Abbot had said to her one late night, leaning over her until his breath was warm on her cheek, “it is not that I do not see your skill, but others will not understand. You must tell no one. Not yet.”

He promised things would change.

And now they would, Agata thought as she turned back to the Subject and its ghostly pale skin and its knobbly fingers and its broad, sweeping shoulders. She alone, not Brothers Renaldus or Iacomo, would be the one to unearth the Subject’s secrets. 

Her cheeks were aching. Agata pushed trembling fingers to her face and realised that she was grinning, her mouth split into feverish bubbling glee. Tucked somewhere in the Subject’s clammy skin and sharp bones was the glory she’d waited so long for—but before Agata could unearth it, the cellar door banged open, and Sister Lucia scattered inside, her belt unfastened and her habit creased.

“So sorry, Sister Agata, I was waylaid in the kitchens and—” Sister Lucia’s excuses spilled into a shriek as she took in the Subject stretched out before her.

“Keep your voice down!” Agata hissed. “This is a highly sensitive matter and the Abbot has entrusted it to me—to me and to you—alone. We cannot have the others coming to see what you are screaming about.”

She chose not to think about her own noises, made just moments earlier.

Sister Lucia’s lip trembled. Another scream hung upon it like a drop of rain waiting to fall. “The man is malformed. What manner of sin could cause someone to be born this way?”

“Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin,” said Agata.

She had not thought Sister Lucia’s eyes could get wider, but somehow they did, until the rest of the girl’s face seemed to scrunch up to make room for her round blinking eyes. “Everything is to do with sin!”

Of course, thought Agata. She had forgotten how fervently the girl still read her Bible. Sister Lucia was only two years into her vows, and carried the fervour of one who had been given the luxury of choosing them. Her father, a local signori, made yearly donations to the convent to ensure his youngest daughter was treated well.

“I want you to make notes,” Agata said, watching as Lucia obediently picked up her wax tablet. “I will tell you what to write as I go.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind something snagged on a memory: Destroy everything, the Abbot had said. Tell no one. But this was an autopsy, was it not? He would want notes. He would want evidence of Agata’s achievement.

Sister Lucia did not come any closer, eyeballing the Subject with fear. Her lips curled as she took in the sight before her. Agata found herself mimicking the way Lucia’s lips moved—down instead of up, that was the proper way to respond to what she saw. Lucia’s skin did not prickle with excitement when she saw the Subject’s long limbs and birdlike chest. Her mind did not fizz and spark and crackle at the thought of what was inside.

Agata reached out and touched one gentle fingertip to the Subject’s skin. It was smooth and waxy and as cold as she had always imagined a body would be. She ran that finger down the length of its side, stopping at the hip. The triangle where the Subject’s legs met was as smooth as the rest of its body. “Subject has no sex organs,” she remarked, and she knew from the way Lucia’s scratching on the wax tablet stalled that she had chosen an unwise place to begin her notes. “Sister Lucia,” she said. “Do you require a new stylus?”

“No, Sister,” came Lucia’s meek reply. Agata nodded curtly.

The Abbot had furnished her with a set of silver tools, sharper and shinier than the convent’s copper instruments. Agata picked up the scalpel, watching the candlelight cast an amber glint on the blade. 

She looked back down at the Subject, and touched her scalpel to its abdomen, where she would make her first cut. Then, hands shaking, she dragged the scalpel down and across, cutting the shape of a crucifix into the Subject’s belly.

What bubbled up under the press of the silver blade was not blood—or at least, it was not the blood of a man. It was thick, viscous, and white.

“Note: Subject’s blood, or something like it, is a bright white,” said Agata to Lucia, who was already turning pale in the corner of her eye. She looked at the milky substance dripping from her blade, turning it this way and that with rapt fascination. Never had anything like this been mentioned in the parchments and scrolls she had spent so many hours pouring over.  “An imbalance of humours, perhaps,” she mused aloud. “An extreme imbalance.”

“Too much phlegm,” offered Lucia, and her voice was tinged with relief that Agata had named a sensible explanation. “Shall I note that down?”

Agata glanced back down at the Subject. “No.” Taking a vial from the box of tools the Abbot had provided her, she scooped some of the liquid into it and set it aside. It warranted further study.

Agata’s heart thudded frantically in her ears as she turned her scalpel back on the Subject, pressing it deeper until it sliced the mottled skin clean through like it was little but wet clay. The Subject’s belly yawned open, two great flaps of skin giving way to the void beneath. And it was a void, Agata realised with a jolt as she stared into the Subject’s torso.

“Subject has no organs at all,” she breathed, ignoring the audible wince from Lucia as she dropped her scalpel and plunged two fingers into the torso, curling them through the sticky blood until she hit bone. At least that was something familiar, she thought, gently prodding the firm knob of what she suspected was the Subject’s spine.

But when she looked closer, sifting globs of white away from the spine, she saw something unlike any of Galen’s anatomy drawings. The Subject’s spine was ringed by fleshy thin tendrils, curling around the bones like vines around a tree trunk.

“Veins?” murmured Agata. Their purpose, she realised, was to carry blood upwards. A pilgrimage towards the heart.

She pushed her nails into the palm of her hand, grinding little crescent moons into the flesh to keep herself from laughing in delight. Whatever manner of creature currently lay in front of her, it was no man. This was something else, something new. And the Abbot had chosen her to unravel its mysteries, to bring him its heart.

She was so close.

“Please note,” she said, nodding at Lucia, “I will now examine the Subject’s chest.”

Lucia scribbled quickly. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then re—opened it to ask: “Sister, he has no organs inside his stomach… what if he does not have a heart?”

Agata said nothing, waited for the question she knew Lucia really wanted to ask, had wanted to ask ever since she first laid eyes on the Subject.

There was silence until finally Lucia stuttered, “What if this man is not a man at all?”

“An animal,” said Agata, with some scepticism. She knew this was not what Lucia meant.

“A demon.”

Agata knew she must choose her words with care. Sister Lucia was only a novice, but beneath that sweet gormless face, she wielded two weapons: a generous family and a big mouth. Lucia’s father had the power to swat a wayward nun into dust with simply a word.

“It must have a heart, for the Abbot has asked me to retrieve that heart,” she said, keeping her voice level. “And a creature with a heart could not be demonic.”

The words tasted like bile in the back of her throat.

Agata turned her head away from Lucia, gritted her teeth, and returned her scalpel to the Subject’s collarbone. Then, in one swift movement, she sliced that great gibbous chest open. More pearly white goo spilled from it, dribbling down the sides of the Subject’s ribs like too much head on a mug of beer. Then, picking up the bone cutter from the Abbot’s collection of tools, Agata pressed its wicked curve to the Subject’s ribcage.

And what a ribcage it was, each rib as thick and wide as a tree branch. Agata looked down doubtfully at the bone cutter in her hands, wondering if even this shining razor edge could cut through something so thick.

She would find out. She forced the blade down against the bone, and her knuckles were white around the handle, and she could hear herself groan, and sweat slick on her temple, and at the back of her neck and somewhere in the distance, she heard some collection of concerned noises that might have been words from Lucia but that didn’t matter, what mattered was the push—and then the pressure crumbled underneath her as bone cracked.

Agata’s body sagged like water strung from cloth. The bone cutter clattered from her fingers to the flagstones. 

“Are you—” said Lucia, but Agata held up a hand to silence her. 

“I am,” she said, but when she looked up she saw that it was not her hand or her words that had quieted the girl. It was the Subject.

Agata stared. A flicker of light glistened from the Subject’s chest, shining gently in the gloom. She could see dust mites illuminated in the glow, floating lazily past her wide eyes and open mouth.

There, shining faintly under the Subject’s shattered sternum, was its heart.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Remain rational, she told herself. Remain rational. Remain rational but as Agata stared into the cavernous chest she realised that the only similarity between this heart and the one in the diagrams and writings she had spent so long studying was its location. And yet she had no other word for it but heart.

The vines of white that she had seen climbing up the spine finished their journey here, all pouring into the heart like ants carrying leaves to the nest.

Agata looked at the heart. And the heart looked back.

Lucia’s piercing scream, her own strangled cry, the throbbing of her own blood in her ears—it all faded to a whisper, as if Agata was hearing it from the next room. 

The heart was covered in eyes. Dozens of them, arranged as if placed with intent in a spiral pattern that wound around the flesh of the organ—but no matter where they sat, each eye was currently fixed on Agata. They blinked independently of each other, different eyelids flickering open to reveal shades of blue and green and brown.

Terror snatched her by the throat, until every wisp of air in her body evaporated. She gasped for breath, hunching over in a desperate attempt to suck air into her body. The flagstones on the floor rippled closer and closer as her knees began to buckle, but that didn’t matter, Lucia’s voice calling her name somewhere above her didn’t matter, even the invisible hands around her neck didn’t matter because the heart, the heart had looked at her.

She straightened up and looked back into the box and then—

Elation. Agata felt full to burst with it as she stared into those eyes, as though she had breathed in the heart’s golden glow and now she was overflowing with it.

The heart pulsed. Every eye closed at once, then opened again, now in perfect sync. And suddenly there was a voice in Agata’s head, deep and booming and soft and hushed and flooding every corner of her being. 

Mercy, it said.

Agata had not breathed since she first set eyes upon the heart. But now she breathed, and felt her lungs bloom with sweet relief.

Mercy. Please.

This heart, this body, this creature: it was alive. It was alive.

She must answer, Agata realised. No, she must do more than answer: she would ask every question she desired and more, and Lucia would note down all that Agata heard, and when she published her notes, the world would change. Her world would change. No more would she sneak into the Abbot’s chambers by nightfall, trading hands on skin for eyes on parchment. She would be seen and she would be heard.

“I will not hurt you,” Agata breathed, gazing at the heart. “Sister Lucia, do you hear it speak too?”

But when she looked at the novice, Lucia was stricken with fear, cowering in the corner of the cellar. Her wax tablet lay forgotten on the flagstones. “I hear it.” Her voice quavered, thin and stretched. “Yet it has no mouth to speak. It is infernal, Sister Agata, I am sure of it. We must not commune with it.”

Agata pursed her lips, then softened her voice until it was quiet and gentle, alien to her own ears. "Sister, this is a task from the Abbot himself,” said the voice that sounded unlike her own.

Lucia would not look at her, nor the heart. “It is a trick,” she mumbled. “It seeks to tempt us by disguising itself as wretched.” She stood, trampling the wax tablet underfoot. It cracked down the middle, and a loud noise of dismay ripped itself from Agata’s throat. 

“The notes—!”

“Accursed writings that speak of wretched things!” Lucia cried, and her voice no longer trembled. “We must destroy the notes, and the—that,” and she jabbed a finger at the Subject and the heart within it, “with them!”

Agata’s feet moved before her mind had the chance to react, and then she was standing in front of the Subject on the table, her body its shield. “I will not allow it.”

“This is a test, Sister,” said Lucia, “and you are failing.” And then she was moving too quickly for Agata’s eyes to follow, and there was a flash of silver and the scalpel, the scalpel was in her hand. 

MERCY

“Put the blade down.”

MERCY

“I will not. I cannot.” 

Could Lucia not hear the screaming in her mind? Agata stood firm, but Lucia was more straight-backed and steel-eyed than she had ever seen her. Movement coiled within her body, ready to be unleashed the moment Agata’s guard fell.

“We will take the heart to the Abbot,” Agata said, each word as careful as her scalpel on flesh. “We will tell him what we have heard.”

Perhaps it was Agata’s imagination, but she thought she saw Lucia’s fingers twitch, loosening around the scalpel’s handle.

“The Abbot asked for the heart,” Agata continued, bolstered by Lucia’s pause. “He trusts me. He will know what to do.”

No.

Agata winced as the heart spoke into her mind again, and clutched at her brow. She could tell Lucia heard it, too, by the way the girl’s eyes rattled anxiously in their sockets.

You cannot go to him. He is not. He will not.

Agata stole a glance back at the heart in the Subject’s chest. Its dozens of eyes were wide and frantic. HE WILL NOT, it repeated urgently. THEY WILL NOT.

“What do you mean?” whispered Agata. “What do you mean, ‘they will not’?”

But she knew what it meant. She had known when she had cut through its bone and stared into its eyes.

THEY WILL NOT BELIEVE YOU.

Agata’s own heart felt like it might unravel.

The dark circles under her eyes, her ink-stained fingers, the old wax pooled on her bedside cabinet: the Abbot did not see those things. What he saw was a foolish woman with a shrill voice and a face weathered by the sun, easily used and comfortably discarded. If she spoke of what she had seen and heard inside and outside of this cellar, she would be burned. A black magic woman.

And he would take the heart and he would hide it away where nobody would ever find it.

When she looked back at Lucia, the girl’s image was fuzzy like a mirage winking in and out of desert sands. Agata blinked, then realised: tears were pricking the corners of her eyes, blurring her sight.

When the haze of blonde hair and grey wool that was Lucia moved, it was fast and decisive, rushing towards Agata. Agata was thrust aside, her knees hitting stone as she registered Lucia above her, rushing towards the Subject, towards the heart.

“No!” Agata screamed, thrusting her hand forward to grab Lucia’s ankle, digging her nails in until they hit bone. Lucia screeched as she stumbled back and Agata pressed her advantage, yanking Lucia down in one decisive movement. The scalpel clattered to the floor beside them and Lucia reached for it, fingers scratching desperately at flagstone.

But Agata was closer, and she snatched the scalpel in an instant, scrabbling to her feet. 

Lucia was still, only her chest moving as she stole gasps of breath. Bright blue eyes locked on to the shiny blade in Agata’s fist, watching it as one would watch a snarling dog. 

“You will,” said Agata, her voice shaking despite herself, “not move. You will be silent. And you will bear witness.”

She looked at the light that emanated from the heart. It was weaker now, the embers of a fire almost spent.

“Tell me what you are,” she said. “Please.”

She was not sure how, but she felt the strain as the heart gathered what strength it had left to give her its response.

Mercy. Mercy, it rasped. Agata felt a scratch in her brain, like quill on parchment. She felt it scrape against her psyche, and then a searing pain as it ripped the fabric of her mind open and crawled inside.

I am called Mercy. And she was, for she was good and just and she could see all of it, one great clockwork plan clicking forward and backward, and when she was not called Mercy she was called Glory for luck and Ruin for chance, and she was called Dantalion as she lay flat on her back staring up at the heavens rendered in achingly beautiful pastels the likes of which no human hand could paint and there were words and then there were fingers closing around her and all was dark.

I am called Kushim. Dry throat. Dirt under her fingernails, calluses on her bare feet. An inferno above her, the heat of it licking her shoulders—but no, that was the sun and beneath her feet, sand. On the horizon, a mirror glaze rippled over the dunes. I am called Zadkiel. She stared into dark eyes, uncomfortably close. A young girl was clad in the strange garb of a traveler, with minimum red nails. The girl’s mouth was open wide. She was screaming.

No, it was Agata who screamed, her nails driving into the skin of her overstuffed scalp. “It hurts,” she gasped, raking at her head as if to score a hole to drain the memories out of.

It hurts, agreed the heart. You must help.

Agata sighed, lungs ballooning with relief as the heart withdrew its presence and her mind emptied.

“How?” she said.

“How? How? You would help this fiend?”

For a moment, senses overwhelmed by the glare of sun and the smell of incense and the screams of a girl with dark doe eyes, Agata had forgotten about Sister Lucia. She had forgotten what held the novice at bay: the scalpel in her hand. Except it was no longer in her hand. Agata dimly registered the blade on the floor next to her feet before Lucia ran past her.

The tornado of grey and white and gold that was Lucia whirled and crashed, knocking every candle in the cellar to the floor, where they rolled like Ixion towards the Subject’s empty box. The old wood stood no chance: Agata watched helplessly as flames instantly licked up around it. 

Those hungry flames soon found other kindling in the dry and dusty barrels that filled the cellar, roaring into a bright wall of heat that stretched from wall to wall. Lucia gave Agata one last wide-eyed look before disappearing through the door.

If Agata ran now, she would reach the door too, burned but breathing.

She breathed in deeply, cherishing the last gulp of pure air she might ever get. Next to her, the Subject’s heart flickered feebly. “Tell me how to help you,” she said.

The voice in her mind was weak and quiet, as if speaking from another room. This shell is dying. When it is dead, I will die too.

It did not ask the question that Agata could feel lingering on the edges of its consciousness. It did not need to.

There is no time left.

Once again Agata felt a push at her psyche, more urgent this time.

Please.

Agata exhaled, and her mind yawned open. Like a hand into a glove, something else slipped into it. This time, there was no pain—only an exquisite fullness, glory and ruin and mercy and justice pulling her in every direction until the threads that stitched her together ripped apart.

Her legs wobbled, ungainly as a newborn deer. But then she was moving forward, each stride longer than the last, through the wall of fire before her. Flames lapped at her flesh, curling around her thighs and waist and yet she felt no pain.

But she could smell burning wool and hair and skin, and she could see the fat of her wrist boil with thick greasy bubbles, and she stretched one long leg in one impossible step, over the fire.

Then she was through the cellar door and into the courtyard and finally, finally, finally, there was daylight.

Agata stood in the pink of morning and let the breeze skim her cheek. She could smell the sage and peppermint from the gardens, the wet soil fresh from tilling, the warm bread sitting on the kitchen’s sill. 

She could see Sister Lucia, running towards the cloister. Could smell the trail of smoke the girl left in her wake.

Agata opened her mouth wide, wider than she had ever stretched her jaw before, and howled. Sister Lucia faltered, freezing in horror as Agata’s howl broke the morning calm. The sound swarmed the courtyard, booming through every window, every keyhole, every crack in the convent’s stones.

And Agata’s body howled too, bones cracking and muscles ripping as her limbs stretched. Her ribcage bloomed into a bulbous shell, and inside it, she felt her heart begin to drum a new rhythm. 

There were eyes on her, she felt them. Not just Lucia’s, but the other novices and the young oblates, and the sisters walking to Terce, and the Mother Superior herself. They stood in the shadows of the cloisters and watched with ashen faces as what was once Agata loomed above them.

She took one long step towards the wall that separated the convent from the rest of the world, then turned back and smiled serenely.

Tell everyone, she said. And then she was gone.

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Photo by Branimir Balogović on Unsplash

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Meet the author:

Daisy Ravenel (@daisy_ravenel) is a Leicester-based writer. She has previously been published by the Leicester Literary Review and Black Hare Press. She has two freckles on the underside of her left wrist.

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