The secret of anatomy, p.1
The Secret of Anatomy, page 1
THE SECRET OF ANATOMY
By Mark Morris
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press digital edition 2025
Copyright © 1994 Mark Morris
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Meet the Author
In his 35-year career Mark Morris has written and edited around fifty novels, novellas, short story collections and anthologies, and his script work includes audio dramas for Doctor Who, Jago & Litefoot and the Hammer Chillers series. His most recent work includes a 30th anniversary short story collection Warts And All, new audio adaptations of the classic 1971 horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw and the M.R. James ghost story A View From a Hill, the official BBC Books/Target novelization of the 60th anniversary Doctor Who special Wild Blue Yonder, and, as editor, the anthologies After Sundown, Beyond the Veil, Close to Midnight and Darkness Beckons. Forthcoming is a new novel, That Which Stands Outside, and the fifth volume of the annual ‘ABCs of Horror’ anthology series from Flame Tree Press, Elemental Forces. Blood on Satan’s Claw won the New York Festival Radio Award for Best Drama Special, and A View From a Hill won the New York Festival Radio Award for Best Digital Drama Program, and was also awarded Silver at the 2020 Audio & Radio Industry Awards. Mark has won two British Fantasy Awards, and has also been nominated for several Stokers and Shirley Jackson Awards.
Bibliography
NOVELS
TOADY (Piatkus hb 1989; Corgi pb 1990; Bantam US pb (retitled The Horror Club) 1991)
STITCH (Piatkus hb 1991; Corgi pb 1992; Dell Abyss US pb 1992)
THE IMMACULATE (Piatkus hb 1992; Corgi pb 1993; White Wolf US pb 1995; Leisure US pb 2006
THE SECRET OF ANATOMY (Piatkus hb 1994; HarperCollins pb 1995)
MR. BAD FACE (Piatkus hb 1996; Piatkus pb 1997)
DOCTOR WHO: THE BODYSNATCHERS (BBC Books pb 1997)
LONGBARROW (Piatkus hb 1997; Piatkus pb 1998)
GENESIS (Piatkus hb 1999)
DOCTOR WHO: DEEP BLUE (BBC Books pb 1999)
FIDDLEBACK (as J.M. Morris) (Pan Macmillan hb 2002; Pan Macmillan pb 2003; Bantam US hb 2002; Dell pb 2003); German, Dutch and French rights also sold
NOWHERE NEAR AN ANGEL (PS Publishing ltd ed hb & standard hb 2005)
DOCTOR WHO: FOREVER AUTUMN (BBC Books hb 2007)
THE DELUGE (Leisure US pb 2007)
DOCTOR WHO: GHOSTS OF INDIA (BBC Books hb 2008)
HELLBOY: THE ALL-SEEING EYE (Dark Horse Publications pb 2008)
TORCHWOOD: BAY OF THE DEAD (BBC Books hb 2009)
DEAD ISLAND (Bantam pb 2011)
VAMPIRE CIRCUS (Hammer/Arrow pb 2012)
SPARTACUS: MORITURI (Titan Books pb 2012)
THE BLACK (PS Publishing hb 2014)
ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! HORROR HOSPITAL (Robinson pb 2014)
NOAH: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELISATION (Titan Books pb 2014)
OBSIDIAN HEART 1: THE WOLVES OF LONDON (Titan Books pb 2014)
OBSIDIAN HEART 2: THE SOCIETY OF BLOOD (Titan Books pb 2015)
OBSIDIAN HEART 3: THE WRAITHS OF WAR (Titan Books pb 2016)
THE GREAT WALL: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELISATION (Titan Books pb 2017)
INDIGO (A MOSAIC NOVEL) (St Martins Press pb 2017)
THE PREDATOR: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELISATION (co-written with Christopher Golden) (Titan Books pb 2018)
PREDATOR: STALKING SHADOWS (co-written with James A. Moore) (Titan Books pb 2020)
DOCTOR WHO: WILD BLUE YONDER (official novelisation based on the script by Russell T. Davies) (Target Books pb 2024)
THAT WHICH STANDS OUTSIDE (Flame Tree Press pb 2024)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
CLOSE TO THE BONE (Piatkus hb 1995)
LONG SHADOWS, NIGHTMARE LIGHT (PS Publishing hb 2011)
WRAPPED IN SKIN (ChiZine Publications pb 2016)
WARTS AND ALL (PS Publishing hb 2020)
NOVELLAS
THE DOGS (Barrington Stoke pb 2001)
THE UGLIMEN (PS Publishing ltd ed hb 2002)
STUMPS (in FOURBODINGS, edited by Peter Crowther; Cemetery Dance Publications 2005; Barrington Stoke pb 2009)
IT SUSTAINS (Earthling Publications, US hb 2012)
ALBION FAY (Spectral Press hb 2015; Snowbooks pb 2016)
SWORD OF THE DEMON (in STUDIO OF SCREAMS, PS Publishing hb 2020)
AS EDITOR
CINEMA MACABRE (PS Publishing ltd ed hb & standard hb 2006)
CINEMA FUTURA (PS Publishing ltd ed hb & standard hb 2010)
THE SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES (Spectral Press pb 2014)
THE 2ND SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES (Spectral Press pb 2015)
NEW FEARS (Titan Books pb 2017)
NEW FEARS 2 (Titan Books pb 2018)
AFTER SUNDOWN (Flame Tree Press hb & pb 2020)
BEYOND THE VEIL (Flame Tree Press hb & pb 2021)
CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT (Flame Tree Press hb & pb 2022)
DARKNESS BECKONS (Flame Tree Press hb & pb 2023)
ELEMENTAL FORCES (Flame Tree Press hb & pb 2024)
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Acknowledgements
There’s a whole bunch of people involved this time round. I’d especially like to thank:
Peter Robinson of McAlpine Helicopters and the staff at the West Yorkshire police helicopter base for advice on helicopters;
Arek and Jean Hersh for advice on Judaism, and for providing Nel and me with a Spanish retreat when we most needed it;
Julie Akhurst for reading the damn thing in first draft, and for taking the time to write copious notes full of insight, criticism and encouragement (good luck in Australia, Julie);
Nick Royle, prize Chiseller, for advice on London locations and for a million and one other favours;
Pete and Nicky Crowther for setting the ball rolling in the first place;
Kate Callaghan for her incisive and detailed editing;
Nel for … well, everything really.
Other people who helped in a variety of ways during the writing of this book include:
Clive Barker, Ramsey and Jenny Campbell, Peter Coleborn, Lucinda Culpin, Steve and Marilyn Gallagher, Ian Glasper and the “Mushroom” crew, Colin Greenland, David Howe, Dave Hughes, Steve Jones, Graham and Sue Joyce, Joel Lane, Steve and Mel Laws, Kev Mullins, Kim Newman, Imogen Parker, Judy Piatkus, Jim and Sandra Pitts, Seamus Ryan, Mike Marshall Smith, Chris Westwood, Conrad Williams.
I’d like to point out that I’ve taken great liberties with many of the locations in this book, for which I claim artistic licence. Any factual errors are because I didn’t ask enough (or the right) questions and not because I was given erroneous information.
Finally, I’d like to say a huge, albeit belated, thank you to Leeds United for winning the 1992 league championship.
This one’s for Pete and Nicky Crowther, with love.
Table of Contents
* * *
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Part Three
Ch apter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Part Five
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Epilogue
Part One:
Feeling Bad
Chapter One
The beach was as grey as his mood the day that David Fox looked out to sea and wondered how and when all the bad stuff would end.
It was December, and cold. An aggressive wind gnashed at his slight frame, snapping his trouser cuffs, trying to tear his coat from his back. David screwed up his eyes, unimpressed by its bared teeth. He had lived with his own storms for two months now; storms which reduced this sea squall to insignificance. Having paused for a moment, he strode on, his clothes and his blond hair flapping like flags.
He looked down as he walked, watched the pressure of his feet squeeze the moisture from the sand with each step. The retreating sea had left debris behind—straggles of seaweed, lumps of sodden paper with their colour bled away, cans so rusted it was impossible to tell what they had once contained.
A tiny crab, almost translucent, burrowed frantically into the sand as his foot descended, an inch from its scuttling legs. David wished his problems could have so simple a solution. But there was no running away from the turmoil of his own thoughts. They rode everywhere with him, hostile passengers, their jabbering voices filling his head. Even now he could hear their poisonous words; they made him feel victimised, desperate. So desperate, in fact, that instead of going to work that morning, he had driven sixty miles to the seaside town of Starmouth, intending … what?
“Suicide.” He spoke the word and was surprised by it. It tasted strange, like a fruit whose plump colourful flesh concealed a flavour that was bad and bitter.
Suicide? Had he really come here with such a notion? He looked out to sea again, and suddenly recalled a conversation he’d had not so very long ago with his friend, Ralph Joyce.
Ralph was an avuncular man, big and bespectacled, with a laugh that could rattle china. When they were seven years old, Ralph had bowled over a bully who was using his fists to persuade David to relinquish a whole week’s dinner money. In this way a friendship had been born, and it was one that had endured despite that great leveller—distance. Even during Ralph’s two-year sojourn in California back in the seventies, the two had kept in touch.
Now Ralph lived in Bristol with his American wife, Diane. A medical man, he had finally achieved his ambition of opening his own practice in 1985. Diane described him as “that great contradiction in terms, a sensitive gynaecologist.” The conversation which now sprang to David’s mind had taken place the last time he, Ellen and the girls had spent a weekend with the Joyces in Bristol.
It was one of those two thirty in the morning conversations. Ellen and Diane had gone to bed over two hours before, sleepy with too much food and wine, bored with obscure schoolboy reminiscences. David and Ralph were sitting in front of a log fire that would have graced Henry VIII’s banqueting hall, Ralph’s Old English sheepdog, Boss, snoring on the rug between them. Ralph was holding up his brandy glass, squinting at its contents as though looking for foreign bodies. It was their third nightcap, and it would not be their last.
“If you were to kill yourself,” Ralph said after a few minutes of companionable silence, “how would you go about it?”
David sipped his brandy and blinked at his host. Though he was not really drunk, he felt relaxed enough to melt.
“Is that a serious question?” he asked.
Ralph shrugged with his face, jutting out his bottom lip. “Well … semi,” he said.
David looked into the fire, its movements so subtle they almost defied the eye.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “It wouldn’t be anything painful.”
“Painful?”
“You know … like hanging. Slashing my wrists. Crashing my car into a wall. I wouldn’t fancy any of that.”
“What about jumping off a tall building?”
“Urgh … no.”
“Why not? It’d be quick. And you’d make an impact.”
David grimaced at the joke. “What if you changed your mind on the way down? Besides, I don’t like heights.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “No, I think I’d just take a load of pills washed down with a bottle of whisky. I’d tuck myself up in bed and drift away.”
“It’s not always that easy, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes people who do that die by choking on their own vomit. Or they start to have convulsions and die in terrible pain. Or they’re found too soon, and saved, and then spend the rest of their lives brain-damaged.”
David sighed. “Well, what would you suggest?”
“I think I’d have the booze and pills and everything, but instead of tucking myself up in bed, I think I’d drown myself.”
Though he felt as if the fire was slowly roasting the left side of him, David shuddered. “Drown yourself? You wouldn’t!”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s the thought of it. Inhaling all that water. You’d be panicking and kicking. It’d be horrible.”
“Not if you were completely out of your head. Not if you were exhausted. I’d swim out to sea as far as I could, and then I’d just let myself sink. Apparently drowning is quite a pleasant death. The denial of oxygen is supposed to bring on a feeling of euphoria.”
David shook his head and then wished he hadn’t; it made him realise he was drunker than he’d thought. “All the same,” he said, “what about afterwards? You’d be all white and bloated. All the fish and things would have eaten your eyes.”
“Where did you get that from?”
“Well … that’s what they do, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Ralph. He shrugged. “Maybe. I suppose it all depends on how long you’re out there for.” He raised his arms, slopping brandy on to his hand. “But so what? You’ll be dead. Past caring.”
“Nevertheless,” said David, “I wouldn’t fancy it.”
Another short silence descended. The fire popped and hissed like roasting meat; the clock on the mantelpiece ticked sonorously. Boss groaned in his sleep, right hind foot jerking, claws scraping the rug.
“He’s dreaming of the prairies,” said Ralph.
“How do you know all this?” asked David.
“All what?”
“All this stuff about drowning? How do you know it’s so pleasant?”
Ralph looked as though he was about to get pompous, then he smiled widely. “Well,” he said, “it’s a well-known fact, isn’t it? Besides, it stands to reason.”
“Does it?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t see how. No one’s ever talked to someone who’s drowned themselves before, have they?”
Ralph’s eyes twinkled like a Christmas card Santa’s as he reached for the brandy bottle. “True,” he conceded, then held up the bottle. “Fancy another?”
It was not long after this that David had begun to feel unsettled. It was a feeling that seemed to have crept up on him unawares, insinuated itself into his consciousness until finally it was dictating his every move, his every decision. At the time it had seemed a gradual process, but viewed with hindsight it became clear that it had all happened very, very quickly. One day he had been content with his life, sliding happily through the groove he’d carved for himself, and the next, for no reason at all, it had all seemed so pointless and stifling; he had wanted to scramble his way out of the groove, to destroy everything he’d lived and worked for and start again.
Mid-life crisis. That was what they called it. Before now David had regarded the concept as a myth, or at least a nebulous thing, vague and without substance. If he was going to suffer one at all—and he doubted it—it would be little more than a glitch, a bumpy patch which he would ride over and then forget.
