Even
though my view of the outside world was obscured by the nearly blinding light
of a candle, the bright flashes of lightning were clearly visible through the
poorly crafted glass windows. I had been
waiting a long time for this night. The
parchment laid out on the table before me was covered in smudged ink from all
of the times I had tried to revise it.
My thoughts were muddled and dark, but still very clear to me from
behind my thick round glasses. The
experiment that I thought would only exist in planning, was finally coming
closer and closer to becoming reality.
Tonight I would prove wrong all of the people who didn't believe in my
ambitions.
The room was small and had a musty
odor to it. This usually only happened
when it rained, but I was used to the smell by now simply due to the fact that
the year had been so wet. I grabbed my
ink-covered parchment and quill pen and slowly began to head for the door to
the laboratory. The torches that hung on
the old stone walls cast a rather eerie glow over the room, which was of course
my personal preference. A servant
carrying a candle bowed to me as she walked the opposite way down the hallway,
clearly not knowing my thoughts or intentions.
If she had known what I was about to do, the look on her face would have
been worth more than any life or precious gemstone. A soft chuckle escaped my lips as I gripped
onto the old rusty doorknob that was attached to the laboratory door, I was
rather pleased with myself.
The laboratory was pitch black
inside, as the cool air and rain blowing through the open windows had put out
all of the torches. I grumbled a bit at
the sight, knowing I was going to have to light them again sooner or later. Now was not the time to light torches though,
as I had more important business to attend to.
I returned to the hallway and grabbed one of the already lit ones off of
the wall and returned, this would surely provide me enough light for my
experiment. The lightning was also
proving to be a viable light source, as it illuminated the whole lab every few
seconds.
The list of things required for the
night's activities seemed rather immense, and I was definitely not looking
forward to fetching all of them. I was
going to require a various assortment of beakers, a metal table, chains, belts,
and a ‘willing’ participant. Thankfully
I had already collected most of the supplies, this would make the night much
easier.
The door creaked slowly open as my
personal assistant slowly entered the room.
I turned around to see the newcomer and smiled slightly. He looked very much like me, short with messy
white hair, red eyes, and pointed ears.
The boy's name was Cricket, and was a result of a previous experiment
done on nothing else but a cricket. Even
though he didn't speak very well, I knew that his simple nod was meant to be
taken as a greeting. I got up out of my
seat and went over to him, gently taking a stack of papers out of his small
hands.
The boy had been doing some work for
me, secretly of course, on where I could get what I needed for my
experiment. He had been spending the
past few nights going from town to town in search of the perfect
participant. After reviewing the papers,
I nodded to the boy and handed him the stack of papers that I had removed from
his hands just seconds ago. Cricket
disappeared back into the eerie glow of the hallway to fetch my ‘volunteer’.
The dirt covered teenager soon
returned, dragging an equally dirty cloth sack behind him. I knew what was inside of it, but I could not
help wondering what all of the servants and guards thought of the rather
conspicuous package. Did they know what
Cricket was dragging, did they have any idea what I was up to? If so, I was going to have to do quite a bit
of explaining tomorrow when the castle staff got together for breakfast in the
dining hall.
I took the cloth bag from him and
heaved it over my shoulder, laying the body inside onto the metal
experimentation table that I had set up in the corner of the room. After checking the body to make sure it fit
my specifications, I looked at Cricket and smiled in reassurance. Just as I gave this smile, a flash of
lightning shown through the window, illuminating my figure and casting a rather
malicious looking shadow on the old cobblestone walls. I hoped that the storm wasn’t coming to an
end, as it provided a nice atmosphere to the current situation. I waved to Cricket, silently telling him that
it was alright for him to go clean up and change into a set of dry clothing.
Once I was alone in the room, it was
time to get to work. I wish I had
planned this out better beforehand.
Hooking the rusty clamps up to the figure’s extremities was proving to
be extremely tedious, and the chill that I was feeling on my neck was not
making the job any easier. I would have
closed the windows, but the smell of the peasant’s clothing would have been far
worse than any amount of cold. I have no
idea how long it actually took me to finish getting the body all hooked up to
my equipment, but I eventually completed the task. Somehow, I had managed to get them all into
place without waking the man on the table before me.
I decided to take a break for a
bit. The stress in my own bones could be
felt after handling the body for so long.
I had been trying so hard not to do anything that may wake him that my
arms and legs had actually began to shake a bit. The beakers needed to be attended to, so at
least they gave me something to do while I waited for the jitters to go away. The beakers were just a simple act of rinsing
and filling, various chemicals being poured into them. As I messed around with
the oddly-shaped glass bottles, time once again slipped away from me. I ended up getting so absorbed in them that
two hours had soon passed. This time
lapse would have usually not been such a big deal, but the night was dying, and
I needed to finish before morning.
A squeaky clean Cricket once again
appeared in the doorway, his presence made aware to me by a gentle squeak of
his vocal cords. I motioned for him to
come over and stand beside me, and he quickly and efficiently followed my
orders. The boy had always been a good
assistant, but tonight he had proven his worth even more than before. He was an odd individual, but it was
understandable when one remembered the fact that he used to be an actual
cricket. I was extremely proud of him,
as he was my most successful experiment to date. My own creation. Hopefully
what I was going to do tonight would prove to be just as successful. My plans would most likely be clear to anyone
observing by now. I was planning to take
the man as my own, to have a second servant.
He of course wouldn’t replace Cricket, but it would be nice to have a
bit of help around the laboratory. It
may seem cruel to some, but I wasn’t too concerned about morals.
It was at this point that Cricket and
I began to secure the body so the experiment could begin. We strapped his arms and legs down and tied
them again for a back-up. Neither I or
my smaller assistant knew exactly what was going to happen when the chemicals
began to flow through his veins, if anything would even happen at all. Cricket grabbed the edge of the beaker table
and slowly wheeled it over to me. The
wheels were old and rusty, making a rather nasty screeching noise as they
rolled on the rough stone floor. My
hyper-sensitive ears instantly began to hurt at this sound, but I knew that it
was necessary. Finally the noise stopped as the old rusty cart came to a stop beside
me. The glowing chemicals in the tubes
all released their own smell and color, and the smell brought me back to
experiments of past days. In my life, it
was a rarity to experience nostalgia such as this.
Soon, another presence could be felt
in the room. I heard or saw nothing, but
was clearly able to feel someone watching me.
As I turned around, I saw the servant from earlier at the door, a
horrified look on her face as she stared at the unconscious body on the table. This made me smile a bit, thinking of my
thoughts just a few hours earlier. The
look on her face was just as amusing as I thought it would be. When she saw that she had been seen, the
female quickly ran from the door and disappeared down the dark hallway. Nobody
would believe her when she told her story.
Cricket walked over to the door and closed it slowly, locking it to make
sure that we would have no more unexpected guests. The next step was the most important and
sensitive of them all, and we could not have anybody intruding on our
work. I patted the smaller boy's head as
he soon returned to my side.
Cricket began to hand me various
beakers, which I began to pour into the large fragile tubes that were now
hooked to the body through small needles contained within the rusty metal
clamps. They were an invention of my own
creation, one that I was quite proud of.
This assortment of magical chemicals and liquids is what would
eventually contribute to the man’s reanimation as my servant. Even though it might have seemed that the
order of liquids being poured was random, there was actually a very specific
order to them. I put some of the beakers
that Cricket handed me to the side and used others right away. By the time that we were done dumping the
beakers, glowing liquid was beginning to drip off of the table and onto the
floor, forming a sort of glowing square along the edges. Cricket tried to get me to clean the beakers
before we continued with the experiment, but I did my best to tell him that
there was not enough time. It was more
important that we finish the experiment before things went sour.
The metal table's wheels made a noise
similar to the beaker table before it as Cricket pushed it towards the other
side of the room, but it was slightly lower pitched and not as painful. The rain drops could be heard hitting the
crude glass-paned windows as the storm only seemed to get worse. The smaller boy walked back over to me and
looked up at me, a look of curiosity in his face as he wondered what I was going
to do next. There was only thing left to
do. I reached up onto a small shelf and
removed a small vial of dark red fluid.
I had spent months researching this substance, this mixture of chemicals
which would allow me success in my endeavors.
Cricket glanced at me, and I looked at him in return. As we both approached the table to complete
the experiment, a large explosion knocked both of us back, ringing painfully in
my ears as I quickly felt my eyes open.
The room was quiet, the rough fabric
of the crudely woven blanket scratching against my skin as I held it closely
against my form. I looked around the
room, seeing all of the other guards as they slept soundly in their own beds, a
sigh coming from within my lips. It had
all been a dream, and I was still nothing more than the runt of the castle
guard. There was obviously still a few
hours before the sun would rise, and there was nothing else I could do besides
go back to sleep. Tomorrow, the daily
grind of my life will continue, without Cricket, and without my experiment. But
one day, one day I will finally get to have my own strike of madness.
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