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    I, Eternal
    I, Eternal
    I, Eternal
    Ebook126 pages2 hours

    I, Eternal

    By Aaron Hodkinson

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    About this ebook

    In the foggy streets of Victorian London, Dr Ezra Forge has created a formula that will eradicate mankind’s weakness to disease. He knows it will change the face of medical history by putting a stop to infection and fatal illnesses. But the formula has a dark secret, and it is only when the doctor’s wife falls critically ill that the secret is revealed, one which either transforms the mild mannered doctor into a vicious monster, or simply awakens one within him.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateFeb 7, 2015
    ISBN9781326178277
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      Book preview

      I, Eternal - Aaron Hodkinson

      I, Eternal

      I, Eternal

      by Aaron Hodkinson

      Copyright © 2015 Aaron Hodkinson

      Cover design and artwork created by

      Aaron Hodkinson

      ISBN: 978-1-326-17827-7

      All rights reserved.

      1.

      As I try to recount the tale of my somewhat complicated life, I find it hard to choose a specific starting point. I suppose the ideal beginning would be the opposite of my current circumstance, this being with death.

      I believe that although the start of this tale is tragic, it will take nothing from the severity of the devious acts I have committed during my long life. And what may have started with the continuing obsession with self preservation, soon -or so it seemed to me- turned into a downward spiral  of loneliness and heinous acts that etched away at my mind and soul, if you believe in that sort of thing that is.

      My name is Dr. Ezra Forge and I will start the tale with my earliest memory, this being my mother dying of consumption. The sounds of her cackling coughs echoed through our crooked home, and was mixed with the howls of her suffocating cries as the disease eat away at her body and mind. My father hanged himself just two weeks after my mother’s passing. I found his body hanging in the cramped cellar that hid beneath our home and once his pale and lifeless body was cut from the rafters, I was made to go and live with my auntie, not that I am complaining as she was a wonderful woman. Her eyes were piercing and blue and her demeanor was that of a bubbling pot of soup, warm and inviting but when you least expect it she could burn you and send you crashing to the ground if you crossed her.

      Her husband, my uncle for that matter was a tall man, a complete opposite of his wife whom was short and frail looking. He was a tall but strong looking man who sported a bushy moustache that gave him the look of a constant scowl but that was definitely not the case; he was friendly and would always set aside his own problems in order to listen to others. He was a surgeon and had continuously clean hands that were smooth and spotless. My auntie was a retired nurse whom had tended to patients during an outbreak of typhoid just before I was born eight years previous. She had also tended to her sister (my mother) during her crippling hours before death as there is no cure for the respiratory disease and all anyone could do was to make the person comfortable.

      It was these early series of events that pushed me into the field of medicine. When I was in school I focused all of my mental capacity on the sciences and by the time I was 15 I had poured over mounds of books over and over until I could memorize every word on the page. By the time I set out on my journey to medical school I was the age of 18 and the year was 1850. It wasn’t long until I felt as though I had learnt everything there was to learn and it was this attitude that annoyed my lecturers to no end but as I studied each night, the same words and diagrams occupying my evenings until the thoughts of my parents dead bodies began creeping back into my memory. Not from a depressive point of view, but more from an interested and curious point of view.

      It was this interest that allowed me to study what happens to the body during death, whether it is a prolonged and painful death, to a short and painless one. It was at that point in my early life that I found a job in the sub levels of a local hospital in which I worked in a morgue with one Mr. Jules Telford.

      I am so surprised that your stomach is not turned at the sight of the innards of this poor soul Ezra said Jules as I was mid autopsy on a woman in her mid thirties after she had been murdered just two days previous in the back alleys of a dirty London street.

      I don’t see the insides of the human body as something that should be squirmed at Mr. Telford, I see it as something of beauty and wonder and I do not see the need in working out what lurks within the depths of the deepest ocean when there are so many secrets and mysterious beneath our skin said I as I removed the heart of the young lady, the red of her life force seeping through my fingers as it began to settle in its solidified state.

      Please Ezra, I have told you that you can call me Jules, I do not call you Mr. Forge do I? But you have a strong mind my friend and I know that you will take large strides in your life said Jules as he took the heart from my hands and shot me a joyful smile.

      I always liked Jules Telford, he was a small and chubby sort of man whom had a large and bushy beard and wore small spectacles that sat at the tip of his nose, a lens attached to his right eye in order to magnify whatever he required to look at. He was a good man and he taught me many things during the 2 years in which I worked at the morgue, these lessons became locked away in my journals and would serve me well during my experiments into a subject I knew would change my life and the lives of others. It wasn’t until later that I found the act of helping one’s self was all I needed to know.

      2.

      Once my time at the morgue had ended and I had said my farewell to my friend and colleague I decided to travel. I wasn’t sure at first where to go, so I used the money I had saved and took a train to the northern parts of Scotland before heading over to Europe, stopping at Amsterdam, then Germany where I attended lectures on the subjects of post mortem examinations, the nervous system within the bodies of not only animals but humans also. There were lectures on the subjects of brain activity during a person’s life as well as at the moments of death and it was this that fascinated me greatly. This being because some of the doctors believed that the brain projects a final surge of activity at the moments of death, this was something that made me contemplate the origins of heaven and the afterlife, it also made me think about whether the brain really dies and maybe it is just one’s body that gives up. I still feel that the heaven which is documented is a mere hallucination which the brain projects onto one’s mind’s eye after death, I see it as a rush of energy that surges through our nerves and results in memories from a person’s past becoming even more vivid, thus resulting in an after death experience that is created and which allows the deceased to live on for a short time afterwards within their own mind that is slowly shutting itself down.

      The lectures also discussed comas and I remember thinking that death and a coma is one in the same, the difference is that one may crawl back from a coma. But what if one could crawl back from death, better yet what if one could simply postpone death by continuing regeneration of cells as well as brain activity. This idea I felt, could be the answer to rapid healing of wounds as well as the regeneration of brain matter thus eliminating brain diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. It was not until the year of 1906, some 53 years later that my idea and research could have been implemented to the cure of Alzheimer’s which would be eventually discovered by one Dr. Alois Alzheimer. But by that time my life and I would be changed dramatically after my discoveries.

      It was during my time in Germany that I made acquaintances with a doctor of a large mental institute in Berlin, his name has escaped me at this present time but it was during our time together that I learnt of something in the mountains of Norway, something that would alter my research into the idea of cell regeneration dramatically. He also told me of the Zebrafish which has the ability to regenerate its own cells in order to heal itself from injuries and also from aging. This is something that I had researched but only briefly and decided to find out more about the subject.

      Once leaving Germany I returned to London to continue my work and it was then that I really found myself taking leaps in a subject that I felt doctors feared to step, but when I approached some for funding I found they dismissed me almost immediately, this was something that baffled me and in my 24th year of age I made the decision to ask my uncle for aid in the funding of my work as I was in need of traveling to not only Norway -in order to locate the root that I found out to be named Devil Bark and which had the property located in its sap which, when combined with a chemical mixture, could aid in the regeneration of cells-  but I also needed to make an excursion to the south eastern Himalayan regions around the areas of Nepal and Burma where the Zebrafish could be found and I could take a specimen for research

      3.

      It was not long after I had the idea to ask my dear uncle for a loan that he in fact died. This shocked and upset me but it was with his death that I could take the first steps into my research with a hearty determination. This was because my uncle had left me a large sum of money in his will and it was with this money that I was able to rent an apartment to the north of the centre of London, and it was with

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