Darkheart

The Present: Ladies & Gentlemen

"Are you sure this is something you want to do?" Kai was right up close to Jeremiah, her face inches from his. He was beginning to become familiar with the intensity of her gaze, her propensity for nearness, but he wasn't sure he'd ever get used to it.

"Yes, it's fine. I've been wanting to come here for years."

"Bucket list?"

"Something like that."

They stood before the doors of the unassuming museum, its classic brick and sandstone façade and large wooden doors hardly the stuff of nightmares. And yet, what lay within . . . Jeremiah had known of this place for years, but he'd never been sure he'd be able to visit it--wasn't sure he was up to it even now, physically or otherwise.

"Is your skeleton in there?"

"No. I've already told you--Charles Byrne is at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. They've got some other giant here. I don't know who."

Rather than respond to his brusqueness, Kai took hold of his hand, wrapped her small fingers through his long fingers, and squeezed. Jeremiah let out a quavering breath. Why she'd stayed with him after their confusing first encounter, after he'd blubbered all over her shoulder when she'd reminded him he'd wanted to die, he didn't know, and he didn't ask. They'd been inseparable since then, though not due to a romantic connection so much as a human one. Kai hadn't trusted him on his own, and he hadn't wanted to be alone, so he'd stayed with her and her auntie ( Nan had gone off to eat nachos somewhere else, presumably). After gathering the courage, he'd quit his job and cleaned out what little he'd had in his studio apartment, and they'd rented a car. Since then, they'd been coasting, meandering slowly toward what he knew was his point of no return.

He hadn't told Kai much about what was going on. In fact, she'd seemed almost disinterested, hadn't asked him any questions about where they were headed or why they were headed there. She had asked him only why he'd wanted to die--that'd been the day he'd woken at her place--and he'd told her it'd been because of a message, a text from someone in his hometown, telling him it was time he came back. If Kai had wondered what about that could possibly push Jeremiah to the brink of suicide, she hadn't asked.

She herself was a mystery, but he hadn't been able to get out of his own head enough to try to get into hers. He just accepted (though not quite appreciated) the fact that she was there.

Philadelphia was one stop on their journey; it wasn't particularly on the way, but in conversation, Jeremiah had pointedly mentioned a desire (more an imperative), to go to a museum there--a museum of human oddities. So now here they stood before it, Kai with her arm looped in his, and as they ascended the steps, she laughed almost nervously. "It's like we're going to one of those old time circuses, with their terrible exploitations. Ladies and gentlemen, step right in--like that!"

Jeremiah said nothing, and within moments they'd immersed themselves in an assemblage of horrors more visceral than any ghosts or supernatural creatures. Skeletons and conjoined fetuses and bits of flesh and hair, wax models of the heinous effects of various diseases and malformations, cross-sections of all manner of things that were never meant to be seen, rotten and infected innards, hands and feet and pickled brains and a miraculously preserved corpse or two, a nine-foot-long colon and an entire wall of skulls--these and so many more gruesome bits were meticulously curated and displayed for any depraved or morbidly curious soul to encounter. Such grisly material, phantasms and monsters in their own right, touched a well, a void deep within Jeremiah, for these were mutations and violations of the body itself, one's most private, most intimate boundary. And it wasn't the mere existence of such monstrosities that disturbed him so much as the fact that they were visible, laid bare for absolutely anyone to gawk at, the secret shames and pains and parts of real people.