Death House

I was only a boy when this place was built. They called it the Health House. It foretold of great gladness and life’s fullness with an end to the woes of those most ill and feeble among us. Never again would a man die of common sickness or small wounds. Such a thing could only be a gift from the heavens.

That could not have been farther from the truth. It is a twisted and most foul thing, more akin to hell. Its halls are reeked with the rotten stench of sickness, and every room is filled with the wails of the dying. Instead of mirth, the thought of being here fills men with fear. That vow of health and happiness was a lie. This is no place for living men. It is where they come to die. So, folk have taken to calling it by another name—the Death House.

Still, there was a time when things were not so bad. Many healers would gather in the Death House to make all manner of charms and potions to cure most common ailments. Some were skilled in fleshsmithing to rightly set broken bones and sew wounds. There were midwives and milkmothers to help with birthing and child rearing. Mayhaps, that was a time when this place might have been called good. But that was before the sawbones had made a home of it.

They first came in the middle of the night, seeming as if some kind of wrathful spirits. They hid themselves behind ghastly masks, burying the stench of their lies under oversweet breath. Do not be fooled by their honeyed words. The sawbones are not trustworthy creatures. They endlessly crave the knowledge of life, seeking it from the dead.

Like crows, they are drawn to the battlefield. They poke and prod at those fallen men, hoping to learn the hidden truths of the body. They pull out the guts and all other innards. They look for piercings in the flesh, keeping an unholy writ of all their findings. The sawbones are little more than witches who worship a deep knowing that only they may understand.

What they do with the living is even worse. They come and herd them like sheep, taking those who are too ill to fight or flee. The few who still cling to life can hardly be called men anymore. No longer are they all fleshy, but instead, they are much of wood and metal with such spells about them that even devils would not dare to wield them.

The rest of those ill-begotten men who find themselves in the care of the sawbones meet a most painful end. They are strapped down, and their limbs are hacked from their bodies. If that does not kill them outright, they will soon wish that it had. They are opened up like frogs. The sawbones peer into the still-living flesh of these men to glean what little lore they can with no care for the harm they cause. They are all heartless creatures, even more heartless than those whose innards they have pulled out. Some of them even come to bemirth themselves in the cries of their helpless playthings. The few who cannot stomach such work stay but not more than a few days before leaving, never to return to the Death House.

The sawbones have as little care for the dead as they do the living. They cast them into the thickets out back. Neither those poor souls nor their kin have gold enough to buy a right burial. The bodies are in such great and heaping piles that all manner of wild things come to eat of their flesh. What doesn’t find its way into the bellies of those beasts lies stinking and rotting in the sun, filling the Death House with flies and foul smells that my nose has long since become numb to.

The sawbones have no such troubles. They are much beloved of their kin and their kith. You will not find such gruesome sights and smells when they die. They are set within great wooden boxes and are carried by many men with many more to mourn them as they are lowered into the ground. Once they are buried, sweet-smelling flowers and great stones are laid above their graves.

Even knowing all this, I did not yet hate the sawbones. They merely behaved as their weird, wild ways willed. Yes, they are evil creatures, but how can I hate them for being as God made them? It is by his unknowable wisdom that the sawbones came to be, and if he deems them a needed evil, then they must be. It was not until my brother was brought to the Death House that I began to hate them.

He had been shot in the belly while fighting in the south. They brought him with many others in the back of a wagon. The ride could not have been a good one, for they had all been carelessly piled on top of one another as though they had already perished. By the time he got here, his wound was all green and reeking of rot. To the sawbones, he was like chum in the water. Drooling and gnashing, they leered lustfully at him, for his wound was oddly set in his belly. I could see it in their eyes. My brother would never leave.

I knew that his wounds were too great to walk. Even if he could, the fever had long since taken him. In spite of that, I wished for nothing more than him to get up and run far away from this place. Instead, he could barely open his eyes, weakly moaning as they tied him to the board and carried him off. After he was taken away, I knew, then and there, that I would never see him again lest I walked about the back. And, of course, I could not do that. The sawbones had already taken my legs the month before.