Organ Grinders

CW: This story contains references to human dismemberment and the use of the term "gypsy." Reader discretion is advised.

Dr. Henry Moreau started his day by listening to the same awful music being played outside. An organ grinder trolled the congested Boston, MA streets; looking for eager patrons to listen to his soothing melodies, cajoled by his cute Capuchin monkey’s dance, and possibly make enough money for a bite to eat. It wasn’t as though the song being played was an awful choice.It wasn't . It was because it was being played so badly and with a pump organ of the utmost poorest quality. The awful din interfered with Dr. Moreau’s ability to concentrate on his experimental research and medical practice.

He had dedicated nearly ten years of his life to trying to understand blood circulation within the human body. He intended to apply what he had learned to advance medical procedures involving limb reconstruction. It was his soul purpose and mission in life.

The Civil War, and its carnage, had provided its fair share of the loss of lives and limbs. Many wounded war veterans ventured home with missing limbs due from bone infections caused by lead bullet fragments. He vowed to himself that he would do what he could to find a viable alternative to limb amputation. Thus far, his work looked promising, and he was hopeful for a solution in a few years.

On this day, Dr. Morceau heard the clamor outside his residence as the Boston police arrived on horse and carriage to usher away an obnoxious organ grinder from further tormenting the poor apartment tenements and struggling small businesses owners on Boston’s south-side. Residents and business owners alike, often complained about a loud pipe organ being played in their streets early in the morning hours while seeing a Capuchin monkey making a racket outside of their apartment windows. It has now become customary for local town Constables to hand out sixpence summonses to this and other pesky organ grinders for disturbing the peace. This was a stiff fine which local ordinance required to be paid to the court bailiff by the end of each business day. Although this brief reprieve and accompanying silence was welcomed by all, most often, this din would return within minutes as others took their now vacant places. This din reverberated long into the late afternoon and evening hours.

The only good thing which resulted from this country's Civil War was the unlimited supply of medical cadavers now available to the medical research community. However, those available were often too severely degraded and quite unsuitable for future medical use. As of 1874, Dr. Morceau and other scientific researchers teams found it increasingly more difficult to find medical cadavers to work with, and had now endeavored to find less scrupulous means to secure them.

To those directly and secretly involved, Dr. Morceau informed them that he didn't want any information about where these bodies came from or how they received them. Moreover, he had these bodies delivered to the basement of his private residence. They arrived in sealed large wooden whiskey barrels with five inches of whiskey poured over the corpse. This served as a preservative and a means to mask the deceased horrendous stench. In an attempt to avoid possible identification, the cargo haulers removed the head of each specimen.

Dr. Morceau paid the delivery company six dollars for each body delivered and never asked questions. As far as he was concerned, these unfortunate souls died of incurable diseases or were unfortunate accident victims . Moreover, he reasoned that in the end and in this particular situation, the end justifies the means and his medical research was way too important to worry about ethical, moral or legal technicalities.

“Are you coming up yet? “

A voice shouted to Dr. Morceau from the cellar hallway door upstairs

It was Mary, his late brother's widow, who wanted to know if he wanted to join them for breakfast. She had made scrambled eggs, bacon, and wheat toast.

She listened as Dr. Morceau clamored up the basement stairs with his customary thump on each step. As a now retired Civil War surgeon and battlefield medic, he had lost his right leg in a grenade explosion and wore a wooden prosthesis to get around now. Outside of his current physical affliction, Dr. Morceau was in excellent physical health. He stood about six feet tall and weighed some 175 lbs. At 38 years old, he still possessed broad, muscular shoulders and a very trim physique. There were only slight traces of gray whiskers now creeping into his black beard and mustache. He was still in his white lab coat when he finally reached the top step to the cellar door and stepped into the apartment’s tiny living room.

When he finally arrived at the dining room, he observed his niece, Rachel, standing by the dining-room window and making hand signs to the organ grinder’s Capuchin monkey. The monkey, dressed in a red hat with a yellow feather and a yellow and brown vest, caught his attention. It was performing a peasant dance for Rachel before he called her.

“Rachel…get away from that window at once!” Dr. Morceau snapped as he took his seat at the dining room table.

Mary sat next to Dr. Morceau. She handed him the scramble egg platter. He took some on his plate while passing it to her to set up a breakfast plate for herself and her daughter.

She was an attractive young woman in her mid-thirties. Her husband, Frank, was Dr. Morceau’s older brother who had died in the Civil War. At forty, Frank Moreau was one of the fiercest and best known captains in the Union Army. He died from a gunshot wound suffered several months before the war had ended. Rachel was their only child, and they both moved into Dr. Morceau’s apartment after his untimely death.

“Henry”, Mary started. “I think you should stop this cadaver business at once…there's something just not right about all of this…experimenting on dead people and all. “

“Look, Mary”, Dr. Morceau started in a very stern tone, and with some disgust. His eyes now rolled upward to the dining room ceiling and down again while his mind was no longer willing to to again rehearse this worn out topic.

“The dead are the dead…nothing is bringing them back! Why shouldn’t I avail myself of a resource to further my medical work? I can’t afford to wait for the government to clear all the red tape. “

“It‘s just unholy to mess with the dead in the manner in which you do, that’s all. I don’t have a good feeling about it. ”

Mary said this as she got up to get the milk pitcher for her coffee. She watched as Henry spread apple butter on his wheat toast and then covered it with currant jam. He seemed to savor each bite as he sipped his freshly brewed coffee.

Rachael had gone back to the dining-room window and was once again looking at this organ grinder’s Capuchin monkey, who had again returned for an encore. Rachel was playing along with this monkey when her necklace somehow got caught in the silk curtains next to her. When she realized she had become caught and couldn't free herself, she frantically screamed for help.

Dr. Morceau got up from the dining room table and headed toward her. As he approached, he could see that the gold clasp from the gold plated heart-shaped pendant had gotten caught in the fabric of the window drapes. It was a decorative pendant which also had a fine ruby stone in its center and a diamond arrow running through the heart’s center. He had seen nothing like it in any of the jewelry stores in town. His brother had bought it in Kansas just after his daughter’s birth and Mary gave it to her daughter on her tenth birthday some three months ago. It was a quite distinctive piece of fine jewelry and unlike anything east of the Mississippi River.

With some difficulty, Dr. Morceau freed her from the living room drapes and calmly asked her to rejoin them at the dining room table.

“Look,” he started, “I have a lecture at the university this afternoon and I will be back early tonight. Let me know if there is anything you might need in town and I will pick it up on my way home. ”

Mary prepared a small brief list for him, which included several yards of blue yarn, some needles, and three pounds of salted pork from the butcher.

“Do you think I can go outside and play with that monkey?” Rachael asked, while watching it perform a dance at the living room window again.

“Absolutely not, my dear!” Dr. Morceau exclaimed in a very stern voice. “There is something very evil about that creature. I don’t want you anywhere near that thing. You understand?”

Reluctantly, Rachael agreed she would go nowhere near that monkey. She gave her uncle a big hug. Although she was only ten years old, she was a spitting image of her mother.

It was nearly 8 pm when Dr. Morceau returned from town with the requested supplies. He placed the needle and yarn on the dining room table and put the salted pork in the pantry’s pork salt barrel for safe keeping.

He saw Mary’s light was on in her room and went there to say good night.

“Everything okay, Mary? “

He asked as he entered the tiny room.

She was sitting on her bed and reading a novel next to her kerosene lamp. She was in her night clothes and wearing a silk bathrobe.

“Everything is fine, Henry. What’s up? “She asked as she looked up from the page she was reading.

“Nothing, but I got Rachael something special from town. Do you think she is still up? “

“She went to her room several hours ago and since she has been so quiet, I assume she has fallen asleep. I do not have the heart to wake her.”

Mary observed the twinkle in Henry’s eyes at the surprise gift he held in his right hand.

“ Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to wake her for a moment, anyway.‘’

Mary whispered as she and Henry headed to Rachael’s room.

Rachael’s room lay some thirty feet away and on the other side of this tiny apartment and on the first floor and toward the back. They knocked on the door and did not hear any response and opened the door. Mary started screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Oh my God, where’s my baby? Where’s my baby!”

Dr. Morceau checked the entire room, the entire house, and the surrounding yard. Despite his best efforts, Rachael was nowhere to be found. The bedroom window was open and there was no sign of any forced entry into the building.

The Boston Constable sent over his team to search the entire area and surrounding neighborhood and did not come up with any leads. It was as though Rachael had simply vanished from the face of the Earth.

Dr. Morceau put down the gold locket he had purchased in the neighborhood jewelry store on Rachel’s bed in the hopes she would return to see it. He visited the local morgues and even went to several residents for troubled youths, but nothing ever came of it. After three or six months of inquiries and searching, Dr. Morceau became convinced that he would never see his niece again or be able to explain her disappearance.

One morning, some eight months after Rachael’s disappearance, Dr. Morceau heard that same awful din from the town’s many organ grinders. The racket outside was now too loud for him to bear. He proceeded outside to ask this organ grinder to immediately vacate the premises so he could continue his work.

Upon exiting the building, he confronted the organ grinder, who appeared to be an older man with a black mustache and disturbing grin. He wore a blue jacket with a white shirt and brown trousers. If Dr. Morceau was to guess, he estimated his age to be around 50-55 years old.

This stranger appeared to be of Eastern European descent, and from the manner of his clothing, appeared to be a gypsy. But what caught Dr. Morceau’s attention was the Capuchin monkey, which accompanied him. It was the same monkey which had taunted Rachel on prior occasions from the dining-room window. It had a gold necklace around its neck, which upon closer inspection, revealed to be the same necklace once belonging to Rachael and given to her by her late father.

Dr. Morceau tried to communicate with this organ grinder, who, seeing both anger and shock in his eyes, pushed away from him and headed quickly down the street. Being a partial cripple, Dr. Morceau could not keep up with him and had to give up this chase before having gone very far.

It was only after he got back to his basement lab and again began his experiments that he realized the manner and mechanics behind Rachel’s disappearance. To even him, this was an unfathomable realization, and it shook him to his very core. He now prayed that both Mary and God could ever forgive him for his many unholy transgressions.

He listened keenly into the distance as he heard that awful din play once again; luring unsuspecting victims to music and dance, and ultimately to their own deaths. His mind now recalled the snarling and unnatural grin of a poor peasant gypsy; now lurking in the shadows of Boston’s dark and lonely streets, prowling for future cadavers to make enough money for something to eat.