The figure lying before her was grotesque in appearance. His face was covered by thin waxy skin stretched taught over the bone. The eyes were sunken in, the nose was absent. This image would have been frightening to most, but Aimee was quite used to the dead. She knew them to be silent and harmless, and she put no stock in stories of ghosts or living corpses. Furthermore, the dead provided a ready opportunity to her. Through them she could learn about what truly interested her, the living.
Aimee Bernard had always lived here, in this gloomy house on the outskirts of Paris. Her father was the resident undertaker, a job that never left him in want of work. The overpopulated city with its graveyards already stuffed to the point of bursting, often sent their dead out to the little surrounding towns. Pierre Bernard could be seen driving his little black hearse into and out of Paris nearly every day.
The Bernard morgue was a peculiarity in that it was surrounded by a mostly empty graveyard. Those wealthy enough to afford it had their loved ones interred in consecrated ground. In these cases, Bernard performed the typical embalming process and carried the loaded coffin to a nearby church were a funeral could be held. Many of the dead, however, either had no loved ones to speak of or were too poor to afford this treatment. Thus it was left to the undertaker to bury them in the unblessed earth of his own humble cemetery. Bernard, however, had long ago discovered that doing so was a terrible waste of a valuable commodity. Instead, he had an arrangement with several Parisian medical schools, who would pay him a good price for any fresh corpse he could provide them. And so, Pierre Bernard could be seen driving his little black hearse into and out of Paris nearly every night as well.
Aimee for her part had been greatly influenced by her father's doctor friends. She found herself inspired by the constant presence of death to dedicate her life to preserving life. In short, it became her ambition to become a doctor. Pierre, who desired nothing more than for his daughter to be satisfied, had attempted to persuade his business associates to allow his daughter to attend their prestigious institutions. Although she was quite intelligent, as a woman she was never permitted more than to sit in on lectures. The first hand experience of working on cadavers was always denied.
So Aimee began to teach herself. Her father provided her every so often with an extra corpse, and she set about learning her anatomy first hand with the aid of the college tomes and lecture notes. These texts were now spread on the counter beside the gurney holding her father's latest gift, only the third cadaver she had ever been given to dissect. This emaciated fellow had come straight from the opera house where he had been found dead in the basement. Supposedly, he was the Opera's resident ghost, a man who had conned the managers out of many thousands of francs. "Well you certainly look like a ghoul now," Aimee mused as she reflected on what she knew of the now dead man's rather ironic life.
She looked over her notes and decided to begin with the heart. The four chambered structure was drawn in some detail on the page, but Aimee knew that the drawing would not compare with the real thing. After the brain, this small unassuming muscle was the most vital organ: should it fail, the entire body will follow in a matter of seconds. She gently undid the buttons of the fine white shirt the body wore, slipped it off him with little difficulty, then folded it and set it aside. The pale chest was ribboned by blue veins. She consulted her notes again as she grasped her scalpel. The blade rested for a moment on the surface, before digging dispassionately into the lifeless flesh.