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young Henry is feeling pretty astounded right now,” Jukes sniggered, and Dorian good-naturedly told him to shut up.
    At the age of twelve Henry had worked up the courage to ask the doctor how one became a doctor. The man had told of places—there in Vermont and far to the south—where such things were learned. Places to learn, he said, if one had the money. Henry was not deterred by pity, and with each visit he had new questions for the doctor, and over time sweets evolved into books. Books kept hidden beneath mattresses, beneath boards, in sacks in trunks. Books on places beyond, books on history, books on medicine. Before that the only book Henry had ever touched was the Bible.
    She lay with her hands upturned beside her, eyes closed, serene. Her breathing became deep and deliberate, and then faded to almost nothing.
    Dysart produced a thin cotton sheet from beside his chair and draped this across Finella, covering her from chin to toe. Whether this was service to ceremony or decency Henry couldn’t tell.
    Henry could read well enough. His mother had taught him at a young age, before his father had bent him to the field. It had not failed him.
    By the age of thirteen Henry had decided he would not be a doctor. He would become a surgeon.
    Over time books evolved into conversations. Stories of life-threatening cases, revolutionary research, hypotheses as to the functioning of the human animal. Life and death in this doctor’s hands.
    By the age of fifteen Henry had decided he would be nothing less than a
great
surgeon.
    Looking upon Finella’s peaceful face, Dorian said, “One or two of the Fallen have, as part of their respective portfolios, the duty of revealing that which is hidden. I know that something immensely important has been concealed from the world of men, and that I may discover it if I only ask the right questions of the right being.”
    A great surgeon would look inward and see the universe. His skill would clothe him, keep him, and show him the world.
    “I cannot take part in this.”
    People who should be dead would walk on his account.
    “Of course you can, Henry. Of course you can.”
    Bent over in the field, working the soil, often alone, he would recite what he had read. He enacted learned discussions with phantom colleagues. He enacted the thought processes of this genius or that in the lead-up to their discoveries—monologues, diatribes, trains of thought…
    “Tell him what we’re looking for,” Jukes said, sporting an unsettlingly wide smile.
    “Shut up, Adam. Would you get the lights, Mr. Dysart?”
    Henry barely noticed the gas flames lowering and dying, one by one. Propriety had fled and Henry was unable to take his eyes from her.
    It was Dorian’s hand clapping him on the back that broke the spell. The Englishman gestured to the free space to the east of the sigil. The others were already in position. Dysart’s small little eyes glittered hard on Henry as if to say,
Our methods and practices may be unusual, but we remain gentlemen.
Henry felt heat rising to his neck and face, and took the position. A single lamp hung suspended above the table, all other lights removed, changing the atmosphere of the room dreadfully.
    Dorian inhaled one deep breath through his nose—Henry suppressed the urge to run—and began by invoking what Henry later learned were six different names for God.
    Six names.
    Who knew God had a name?
    “Have mercy upon me, and cast Thine eyes upon Thy Servant Dorian who invokes Thee most devoutly, and supplicates Thee by Thy Holy and tremendous name
Tetragrammaton
to be propitious, and to order Thine angels and Spirits to the stars, O all ye angels and elementary spirits, O all ye spirits present before the Face of God, I the Minister and faithful servant of the Most High conjure ye, let God Himself, the Existence of Existences, conjure ye to come and be present at this Operation, I, the Servant of God, most humbly entreat ye. Amen.”
    Something more than dirt