Eliot Pattison - Eye of the Raven

"And what?" Marston asked, "you will go throw pebbles at his cell window? The moment you are seen you will be arrested. You do not want to experience our jails despite the Quakers' best efforts."

Duncan looked at the scientist with new interest. "The Quakers?"

"The Quakers have a society for the improvement of prison conditions, the Benevolent Society, they call it. They have a notion that prisoners can be reformed, not just punished, that their bad habits can be healed like a disease. They have been of great help in relieving the squalor, even of some help to me."

Duncan weighed Marston's words a moment, then leaned forward. "Are you saying you have a connection to the prison?"

"They allow me to treat some prisoners, yes. They have even set up a treatment room in an empty cell."

"And how often do you do so?" Duncan could see the protest already rising on Conawago's face as Marston pondered his question. Duncan did not wait for an answer. "You are going to the prison tomorrow, and with a new assistant. I must see Skanawati."

The stench hit Duncan the moment he stepped through the heavy timber gate of the Walnut Street prison. The high brick walls of the foreyard gave little ventilation for the privies that lined one wall. For a moment he thought the men that sat along the other walls had been overpowered by the smell, then he saw that the debility on most of their faces was not physical. He had spent months in a king's prison, then a prison ship, and knew the great killer was no one disease but rather despair.

Marston paused to open a vial from which he poured vinegar onto his handkerchief before clamping it to his nose. Duncan, declining the offer of the vial, tightened his grip on the box he was carrying for the scientist and followed him into the building.

The Benevolent Society had cleaned out a corner cell on the top floor for Marston's sessions, and its high barred windows provided a modicum of air and light. The jailer, responsible for the entire institution, was a devout Quaker who, though he cast wary glances at the box Duncan carried, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Society. He greeted Marston courteously and gestured them toward a turnkey who silently escorted them upstairs. Though the prison was much more noisy than those Duncan had known-where outbursts were met with clubs and cudgels-as the prisoners saw Marston approach they grew silent.

"Sorcerer!" one muttered through the barred hatch of his heavy door. The moment another saw the scientist he began gasping in a fit of asthma.

Marston quickly unpacked the box Duncan had been carrying onto a table beside a smaller electrical machine the Society allowed him to keep in the cell. He showed his new assistant first how to line up the Leyden jars they had brought with others already there, the workings of the harness that suspended certain prisoners from the ceiling for treatment, then how to steadily turn the wheel that spun the glass ball on the machine. By the time Marston proclaimed he was ready the turnkey had the first patient at the door, an older man with a paralyzed arm. The man silently acquiesced as Marston gestured him to the wooden armchair by the machine, did not protest when the scientist tied the useless arm to the chair then carefully separated the fingers with small rolls of linen between each. Marston placed the hand close to the glass ball and nodded for Duncan to begin rotating the wheel that spun the ball. Moments later a stream of blue flame arced to the nearest finger.

The prisoner watched with an earnest fascination and did not react even as Marston, wearing a leather glove, moved another, then another fingertip to capture the electrical fluid.

"From the machine into your body, always from the machine," Marston murmured quietly to his patient as he worked.

"I think I felt something that time, doctor!" the prisoner exclaimed as he lifted his arm from the chair when Marston released him.

Marston nodded somewhat distractedly as he adjusted his device. "From the machine," he said again, as if it was a habitual refrain accompanying the treatment.

"From the machine?" Duncan asked as the prisoner left the cell. "But of course it is from the machine."

Marston looked up with a self-conscious glance. "There have been misunderstandings, about whether this work is for science or for the devil."

Duncan considered the words as he helped Marston adjust the jars. "Are you saying you have been accused of taking something out of your patients?"

Marston nodded hesitantly. "It is the inevitable burden of those who introduce new science. The immortal Galileo and Copernicus were denounced to the Inquisition." He winced under Duncan's inquiring stare. "There are those who say we extract a patient's soul to store in the glass ball." The scientist looked toward the cell door, as if hoping for his next prisoner to appear. "Fools," he murmured.

"Did this happen at Shamokin?" Duncan pressed.

Marston sighed and turned back to Duncan. "I was away, having Sunday dinner with the Moravians. Some Indians, Delawares and Shawnee, decided to use my equipment. There was an old Indian who had been feeling very weak in the chest, heart problems no doubt. They decided to treat him but had no notion of how to use the device. They let a massive charge build up then touched him in the chest. I am told there were sparks, a terrible smell of burning flesh, and he was rendered unconscious. When they examined him he had a molten lump of metal on his chest. When he regained consciousness he was weaker than ever, the sounds from his lips gibberish. He had clearly suffered some kind of collapse in his heart and brain. He died a few days later. They said my machine had extracted his spirit from his heart and melted it, leaving him an empty shell. When I investigated I found he had been wearing a copper medallion. They had no notion of the energy of the higher charges and so had melted the copper. It has happened numerous times, with lightning rods, with the swords of soldiers in storms, with nails on ships' masts. But they wouldn't listen, at their campfires they said I was a sorcerer, that I was planning to keep them from going on to the next world by reducing their souls to metal." Marston shrugged. "I was at the end of my work in any event."

The second prisoner arrived, a man with a pronounced limp. Duncan silently helped Marston prepare the man in the chair, and as he turned the wheel he listened to Marston's words again in his mind. The Indians, at least some of them, had decided a molten lump of metal on a dead or dying man was the work of witchcraft to extract and destroy his soul. Each of the dead men had had such a lump of metal, jammed in his throat. The killer knew it would have made the dead men taboo, too frightening to touch, would have kept other Indians away from the marker trees.

The next prisoner was the gasping youth. Introduced as a pickpocket, he shook with fear when Marston strapped him in, screamed a curse as the arc touched his hand, and screamed again as Marston touched a metal rod from one of the Leyden jars to his ear. "My patrons believe that there is part of the brain that controls criminal behavior," Marston explained over the young man's abject moans, "that if we can but burn it away the soul shall return to harmony." He gave, Duncan saw, but the lightest of touches to the ear, with the lowest of charges.

Marston stepped to the door as the pickpocket was led away, checked the corridor, and nodded to Duncan, who proceeded with a spent jar back to the waiting wagon. The jailer waved him out through the entry and waved him back in with only a glance up from reading a broadsheet.

Duncan moved quickly from cell to cell on the ground floor, stepping closer to the open hatches on the doors where no prisoner gazed out, ignoring the open cells whose occupants were outside. He paused at the end of the corridor, noticing a shadow in the corner that resolved into a stairwell as he drew closer. With a glance along the hallway he slipped down the stairs. The cellar extended only for half the length of the building, enough for half a dozen cells. Three of the heavy doors hung open, the fourth, judging by the dim lights of the two lanterns hanging in the corridor, held crates behind its locked door.