The Silent Boy. Andrew Taylor
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Fournier says, throwing an unexpected smile at Charles. ‘Could that have disturbed his faculties and made him mute?’
‘Indeed, sir – that may very well be the case. If the hypothesis is correct, then it follows that the best course of treatment may be another shock. If one shock has removed his powers of speech, then a second may restore them.’
‘They say he wet the bed the other night.’
‘Really? Was he beaten for it?’
‘I do not know.’
‘If it happens again, I would advise it, for his own good. He will achieve nothing without discipline.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Monsieur Fournier says after a moment. ‘I won’t detain you any longer.’
Dr Gohlis bows and leaves the room. He does not look at Charles, who is still standing by the window.
As the door closes, Fournier opens a bureau. He takes a sheet of paper from one of its drawers and a quill from another. He puts them on the flap and uncovers the inkstand. He places a gilt chair in front of the bureau.
‘Sit, dear boy. Take the quill.’
Charles obeys. He dips the pen in the ink without being asked.
‘Good,’ says Fournier. ‘Your mother told me that you are an apt student. Pray begin by writing your name.’
Charles bends his head. He writes. The quill scratches on the heavy paper.
‘Now write my name.’
Charles writes.
‘Excellent. And now – write the names of those who visited your mother in your cottage in the Rue de Richelieu.’
The pen moves again. The tip of the feather brushes Charles’s chin.
Monsieur Fournier comes to stand at his shoulder. ‘Let me see what you have written.’
Charles hands him the sheet of paper, the ink still glistening. He has answered each question with lines that go up and down, across and diagonally. They are black marks on white paper. They reveal nothing other than themselves.
The following morning, Charles wakes with the light.
Before he opens his eyes, he is aware of rustles and small movements which he thinks must be rats and mice, which come and go at will and treat the place as their own. He opens his eyes.
Without warning, his stomach gives a painful twitch as if someone has punched him there. He gasps and sits up in bed.
A boy is standing beside the window, his outline clearly visible in the light filtering through the cracks of the shutters. He is smaller than Charles and he is very still. He has his back to the room. He stands upright, his shoulders squared like a soldier on parade.
Just for an instant – for a hundredth of a second – Charles feels joy. He is not alone.
His feelings are no sooner there than they are gone. His lips move. They form the words: Who are you? But the words have no sound so the boy cannot hear them.
Charles is afraid as much as excited now. He swings his legs out of bed.
The boy does not move.
The boards are cold. Draughts swirl around Charles’s ankles and rise up his legs under his nightshirt. He shivers, partly from fear.
He takes a step nearer the window, nearer the boy. Then another, and another. Between each step he pauses. It is like the game he used to play with his mother when he was very, very young.
The strange boy does not even twitch. Step by step, Charles draws nearer to him. Still the boy does not move. He has been turned to stone, Charles thinks, he is a statue. He feels pity, though he knows the boy cannot really be like this; but, if he were, surely that would be even worse than losing your voice?
Charles takes a deep breath, stretches out a hand and touches the boy’s shoulder. It is cold, a little damp and hard – hard like wood, not stone. Charles walks around him and opens one of the shutters. The light from the window falls on the boy’s face.
Or rather – the light falls on the place where the face should have been.
The boy’s eye sockets are empty. There is nothing but a hole where the nose should be. The cheeks are sunken. The lips are almost gone. He still has some of his teeth. He is grinning. He will always grin because he can do nothing else.
Charles draws in a long, shuddering breath. His face contorted, he breathes out: a silent scream.
The door creaks. A current of cold air sweeps into the room.
Dr Gohlis is on the threshold.
‘I see you have found my little friend,’ he says in his strange, thick voice. ‘His name is Louis.’
As he speaks, he comes closer. Charles cannot move.
‘Who knows who this boy was?’ the doctor says. ‘Were you aware that before the Revolution, the poor were so desperate that they sent their children to prison – they sold them on the streets – they disposed of them like unwanted kittens?’
Charles stares at Dr Gohlis over the boy’s shoulder. He wishes with all his heart that the boy was still alive, that he was not alone with the doctor.
‘But even dead boys may be worth a few sous. In life they were quite useless to society. But in death, the lucky ones are granted the chance to serve a higher good.’
Dr Gohlis is standing by Louis’s shoulder now. He throws back the second shutter. More light floods over the boy. Charles covers his mouth with his hands when he sees what has been done.
‘So their parents take the money and drink themselves senseless in the nearest wine shop,’ the doctor continues. ‘And a man of science takes the boy.’ He stretches out a surprisingly long arm and grips the right wrist of the figure. ‘The dead boy. The man of science conveys the boy to another man, a man skilled in the art of flaying skin from a body. Believe me, it is not easy to do it properly, to do it well. It is one thing to remove the skin. It is quite another thing to do it without harming what lies beneath.’
The doctor releases the wrist. His fingertips play on the arm of the boy, patting it gently, rising from the wrist up to the elbow up to the shoulder and then to the neck. He points at a place on the neck.
‘See? This is the line of the great artery which carries blood to the heart. This is bone, here, and here the humerus, and here we have the scapula.’ The hand flutters higher. ‘Note the cheekbone. Do you see how some of the skin is still attached? The man who did this was truly an artist.’
The doctor’s hand sweeps down and grips Charles’s neck. Charles tries to pull away but Dr Gohlis tightens his hold. His hand is as cold as a dead thing, colder than the flayed boy.
‘After this boy was flayed, shall I tell you what happened then? He was covered in plaster, every inch of him. When the plaster was dry, they cut it open – and there is a mould of the dead boy. When you have a mould, you can make many copies. The copies are painted, in this case by another artist who is trained in the work of portraying what lies beneath, the inner mysteries under the skin. See how the muscle and tendon and bone stand out in their proper colours. Is it not a marvel?’
His grip is painfully tight. He forces Charles to move around the boy and to come closer. Now he is looking at the boy’s back.
‘These poor simulacra of humanity are called écorchés,’ Dr Gohlis says, ‘the flayed ones. Isn’t that droll? They assist in the instruction of students of medicine and drawing who are obliged to learn about the inward architecture of the human body. Observe.’
He picks up Charles’s right hand with his own left hand. Charles wills himself not to resist, not to pull away. The doctor forces him to extend his index finger. He runs the finger down the spine of the écorché.
‘Here are