Timothy couldn’t move.
The bear was looking right at him and he couldn’t move. Its eyes were dead red; its body was iron hard; its mind was cold and flat and simple and set straight upon him. Its mouth was just a little open, just a hint of tooth showing, and it made a noise he couldn’t understand that he felt climb up and down his backbone until it shook the building down around him and washed away the world in screaming light.
Then he woke up in his bed, in his dormitory, in Mister Clarke’s Orphanage, too terrified to even scream. And he still couldn’t move.
It gave him time to think, and what he thought was that he finally knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
***
Timothy had only been an indifferent student before that night, and the transformation was sudden enough that even the tired and apathetic creatures that taught at Clarke’s couldn’t help but notice. He read ahead of the class, and when that didn’t suffice he stole books, and when those too were exhausted he spent his tiny stipend of an allowance on building a small personal library, which he kept hidden in a broken heating duct.
Machinery was his chief preoccupation, although he also showed interest in anatomical studies that bordered on disturbing.
***
Timothy was adopted at age nine, by the Duke of Bedlam – a surprising turn of events, but the old man admired his studiousness and needed a heir who was both politically unconnected and probably the bastard of someone passingly important, as was the manner at Clarke’s. The two of them got along like a house that wasn’t on fire, and that polite dispassion suited both of their interests admirably.
Then Timothy turned eighteen, the Duke passed away from an unknown and brief illness, and he had no choice but to shoulder the heavy and unwanted burden of his inheritance.
Any suspicious questions Society may have had were deterred somewhat by the young man’s obvious disinterest in his new wealth. All he did was hole up in his studio, leaving the Bedlam estate to rest idle under the hands of clerks and attorneys while he purchased alloys, chemicals, and carcasses from the national zoological gardens.
***
When Timothy was thirty one of the servants escaped and made it to one of the few constables he hadn’t bribed, and things became awkward. Questions were raised, but the men who were en route to ask them were stymied by the Bedlam mansion being razed to the ground in a tragic and totally inexplicable fire.
He went abroad, to study new animals, and sketch them, and take them apart and put them back together all steel and still. Some of the animals were two-legged, but he was more careful now, and tried to use bodies whose occupants were done with them already.
***
Timothy returned home at age fifty-three, with new wealth and a new name, as a respected surgeon and anatomist. The papers he’d published abroad furnished him with established respectability beyond reproof, and the money he’d made gave him a modest apartment, and the time he had he put to work with feverish pace and utmost subtlety.
Only one of his experiments escaped, and nobody connected it to him after it was brought down, at the cost of sixteen lives and half of the harbour. It had been a disappointment, but nothing he couldn’t learn from.
***
When Timothy was seventy, it woke.
It was an accident. He only meant to rouse its limbs, to stir its guts.
But the fire he’d put in it was steady and furious and it moved like a snake from toe to eye to mind and before he knew what was happening its mind was open and blossoming and it was looking right at him and he couldn’t move.
Its eyes were dead red and furiously alive; its mind was flat and spiralling open and he couldn’t move.
Its mouth opened just a little, just a hint of tooth showing, and it made a noise like “mrurff?”
Then it licked him like a nine-hundred-pound pupyp and he burst into the world’s most frustrated tears.
***
No matter how hard he tried it wouldn’t leave, and eventually he stopped trying to kick it out. At least he never wanted for fish from the harbour, and it kept the rats away.
But oh, but oh, but the damned cost of the honey he went through!