Amity made her way down the stairs slowly, carefully, and without any shooting pain.  It was still dark, and Victor was writing by lamplight. One of his sleeves was rolled up, to make space for a bandage about his forearm that had just begun to spot with blood.  He pocketed his journal as she trudged down the stairs. 

“Good evening,” he said.  

“Yeah,” Amity replied. “The hour is..?”  Her voice trailed off, not that it had far to go.  Victor removed his legs from the Ottoman he’d been sat upon and kicked it towards her.  Amity stopped its motion with the weight of her rear. 

“It’s two in the morning.  I was just about to check on you again and go to bed, myself.”

“Oh.”  Amity sank deeper into the Ottoman, relaxing her muscles as best she was able. “ Sorry.”

“No, this is good.  I wanted to show you the dissection.  Are you well enough for that?”

Amity briefly patted herself down.   “Kinda hungry.”

Victor stood and stretched, yawning. He took his lamp in his hand and beckoned her to follow.  

“See how you feel after this.  Come on, let’s go downstairs.”

Amity didn’t enter the basement often.   It was creepy, dark, and stank of death.  She coughed a little as they reached the bottom of the stairs, and the aroma overwhelmed the herbal gel near her nasal cavity.  

“It’s bad, I know,” Victor said.  “But you’ll get used to it.  If you work somewhere with a sewer system someday, you’ll want a drain in the floor.  It helps with the smell.”

Amity nodded, but didn’t look.  The flicker of Victor’s lamplight caught on a dozen places in the room, then a dozen more as he walked.  Her eyes flickered between polished, wicked-looking implements skewered on a nearby pegboard.   They all began gleaming as Victor lit the cellar lamps.

“So, look at this basin here.”

Amity plodded up behind Victor.  He gestured into a metal tub half-filled with yellow-red fluid.

“You recognize this stuff?”

Amity nodded.

“So.  Question: Why am I submerging your offal in it?”

Closer examination revealed the dog’s stomach and entrails had been left to soak in the tub. Amity sighed.

“‘Cause it’s still creating shit.”

“Not quite. Be more precise: you can write if you want.” Victor extended his notebook, which Amity refused. 

She took a few moments before she continued speaking.  Victor held the journal out at her, holding it open with his thumb, until the first words escaped her teeth. “ It’s ‘cause…”  Victor began withdrawing his arm, but stopped taking the paper away when she stopped explaining.  Amity snatched his pen from his breast pocket and began to write.

There could be human remains inside.  Even if they aren’t being digested fully postmortem, the acid makes it harder to identify what’s left over time.  Plus canny digestion time varies. 

“Good. Correct.” Victor nodded, and began withdrawing the book. Amity pressed the pen to the paper until he stopped.

So I should have done that on site.  Poured in my vial. It’d have saved a few hours.

“Not exactly,” Victor replied, pocketing the text.  He plunged his hands into the vat. “It’s more like you’d want to do the full dissection there if you could, and you had one hand.”  As he spoke, Victor lifted each piece of the entrails from the tub onto the wide, polished table in the back of the room.

Maybe Luca could have poured the vial into the esophagus for you, but it wouldn’t have spread into the stomach- the sphincters are shut. He shouldn’t be handling a corpse anyway.”  Amity winced.  

“A syringe would have worked, maybe. Get right into the intestines.  Leo brings all that paraphernalia with him when he’s bothered to do anything. Usually excessive, but it would’ve helped, here. But, no, you didn’t do anything wrong.  Don’t worry about it, we’ll see what we see.”

Victor withdrew a lengthy knife from the wall and began working it through the guts.  The intestines filleted open, and he splayed them out in an undulating wave of red and tan and brown.

“I’d ask you to do this, under normal circumstances.  Just watch, for now.”

Amity grunted in assent.  

“We do it like this to track how far down things are, relative to one another.  Don’t make a big pile.”  Amity could recognize a few pieces of bone as the cut traveled up the digestive system.   

“Gross,” Amity whispered.  She leaned in around Victor’s side, to get a clearer view.

Victor lifted a bucket of water from under the table, and hung it on a pin above his eye level.  A tube on the bottom was connected to a hand-operated valve.  “For rinsing,” he said.   Amity nodded. “I’d need gloves if I hadn’t soaked this, by the way.  Canny and worse means bad acid, especially.” 

Over the next few minutes, Victor began separating fabric, bone and bits of metal from the meat.  A buckle here, a trio of molars there- everything was at least slightly eroded.  Victor pinched more solid pieces between his fingers, either mashing them to paste or confirming they needed a rinse for identification.

“How’re you feeling?” He asked.

“Okay,” Amity replied.

“I saw you lost your scarf.” 

Amity flinched. She rolled her teeth over one another, listening to filthy water run from the table into the basin beneath it.  “Yeah,” she sighed.

“I’ve got something you can borrow.  Too warm for that thing, anyway”   The gut-mash was organized, now, from the whole of the intestine.  A thin layer of brown and red meat snaked across the table, with all the solid masses laid alongside how far down they’d been discovered.  

The dog’s engorged stomach split. A semisolid pile mash escaped from the knife-hole, and the stomach shrank around it as Victor drew the knife across.  A clump of dark, ruddy hair was clearly visible amidst the acid-cooked meat, where it had been pressed against the stomach wall.

Amity inhaled sharply.   

“Yeah,” Victor replied.  “I know.  They eat the head last, oftentimes. This bit here is neural tissue, I believe.  And I think this is part of the eye socket:  the frontal bone, that’s the plate on top here.” Victor prodded himself in the eyebrow with a bloody finger, and then recoiled from himself with a lip-screwing cringe.  Amity released the breath she’d been holding with a series of near-silent chuckles.

“ I need a bath,” he said.  “I was already sweaty from carrying you around.  You’re heavier than you look, you know.”

“Rude,” Amity whispered. The exhalation broke in the middle with an unsteady chuckle. 

Victor lifted his hands from the wad of meat, and turned to squarely face her. 

“Did you cry in front of Luca?”  There was no harshness to his voice, but the question made Amity tense up regardless. She was reminded of the pain in her neck.

“No,” she said.  She tried to swallow, but it was dry like always.  “I sat a little. On the route here.”

“That’s fine.  But never cry on the job, whoever sees anything.  Says anything.”

“Dignity,” Amity replied. “I got it. I know.”

Victor elbowed her in the shoulder. Gently.  “You’ll get an ego over time.  That’ll help.  You’ve got the shadow of the church behind you, and that’ll stop most people from giving you a hard time, but you’ll have your own reputation before long.  And it’ll be well-earned, and people will think of you like that.  What you’ve done, because of the person you are inside- they’ll see things like that, and nothing else.”

Amity could feel heat rising in her face.  It tingled nearly to the point where it burned.  “Yeah,” she said.  

“Hard day, I know. I still want to hear how things went.  Though I can guess, having treated you.  There’ll be a lecture involved.”

In an effort to change the subject, Amity pointed at the mass of flesh, so near that her fingertip left a divot in it.  “So you’re looking to identi’y, here? “

“Yeah,” Victor said.  “Hair color helps.  And the stage of digestion, plus where you found it, will narrow down finding the rest of the remains.  But sometimes, you can find something…”

Victor trailed away, as his fingers found purchase on something within the last still-compressed chunk.  “Something identifying. Like this.”

The ring he withdrew slid free from a half-dissolved knucklebone.  Victor paused, briefly, to inspect it, then turned the water upon the ring.  It was a handsomely shining piece of jewelry, apparently unaffected by its time in the dog.  The face of the ring still bore its engraving: a dragon swallowing its own tail, coiled around a human skull.  Victor withdrew his hand from the sprayer to compare the ring to his own.  They were, of course, identical.

For a few moments, the only sounds in the cellar were breathing, the drip of foul water, and Victor’s pocket watch ticking through his shirt.

“Still hungry? ” he asked.