Excerpt: Foster, You're a Beast!

17th February

There has been great progress today. I managed to get a specimen that was fresh enough that rigor mortis had not quite set in, and immediately set about severing the neck from the torso. It was not, I should say, pleasant work; when I was finished, the neck had been detached from just above the scapula, and immediately I requested that my assistant place the bellows inside of the severed neck of the dog. I hastily, and somewhat carelessly, went through the motions of detaching the tongue as previously described, using a rather crude method of putting needles in the place of where I thought stitching may have needed to occur in a living thing. Working the bellows, I manipulated the tongue of the dog while trying to get it to vocalize; wheezing, rasping sounds came out of it after a manner of time, and I was moderately befuddled as to the cause; then I remembered, of course, that the neck must be manipulated as well. I instructed my assistant to do so, and by applying careful pressure and changing the manner in which the bellows was connected to the neck, I was able to put some of my previous research into practice, and was incredibly gratified to find that I could manipulate the animal’s tongue such that muffled sounds could be produced. In particular, most varieties of the ‘e’ vowel sound.
This excited me to no small degree, as it was the first series of real results that I had managed to get. Before rigor mortis set in, I went through and began more intensive, and vulgar, work; breaking the jawbone of the animal so that I could open the mouth fully, and severing the tongue straight to its base, giving me an inordinate amount of room to work with. My assistant was absolutely repulsed; I could tell by his bloodless features and nervous demeanor that he, perhaps, did not entirely approve of molesting the deceased animal in such a manner, but I reassured him that it was necessary to study the communication of animals. It is perhaps necessary to state that I, of course, have told my assistant nothing of why the work is proceeding in such a manner; merely that I am studying vocalizations in their various forms. Given that I have been examining human remains as well, he seems satisfied with this.
Manipulating the dog’s tongue further, I was able to position it and move it about such that I could get ‘a’ and ‘i’ sounds with some difficulty; it was still, however, impossible to obtain a ‘u’. The tongue is simply too long and cannot curl back enough to reach the proper point of the palate to produce the correct sound in this situation, and I made a note of it. It does not have to be the case, after all, that an animal speaks perfectly — it merely needs to be able to speak well enough that it can be understood. As long as the proper connection can be made between consonants with a near-appropriate sound, things shall work out well for me; this will take a level of research which I am not entirely used to, having spent more time with patients and cadavers than books.
Working my own mouth, trying to sound out a few basic words that even the youngest and dullest of infants can learn — ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘dad’, ‘eat’, ‘sure’, and the like — I made attempts to reposition the tongue in time with the movement of the bellows to get satisfactory words out of the animal. They did not come easily, and I barely managed to get ‘kot’ and something which sounded not entirely unlike ‘earat’ out of the mouth. Soft sounds, in particular, appeared hard to produce, but that may have been due to the fact that by now nearly an hour and a half had passed, and the body was beginning to stiffen. I could no longer get the tongue to move in the appropriate way to bring about the correct sounds, and it was maddening — I was gripped by a fervor of the sort that I had felt so few times, mostly when I was beginning my medical studies, that absolutely compelled me onwards, heedless of what damage my actions may bring to the specimen before me. To my surprise, then, I managed to pull the tongue so hard that it actually flopped free of the animal’s mouth, blood pooling underneath it on the table as those glassy, dead eyes looked up at me. I swear that my assistant almost fainted; I must have looked a madman, standing there and panting, a dog’s severed tongue in my hand and blood covering my hands and forearms. And in that moment, I felt something of shame for what I had been doing, and met my assistant’s gaze with a sheepish grin, and actually apologized! It struck me, at the time, as the appropriate thing to do; to say that I had been carried away, perhaps too far. A shaky nod was all that I got in return for my troubles.
I bid him farewell, and after he had left the room, I stared down at the detached head and body of the dog. I realized, then, that I was still holding the tongue, and gingerly set it upon the table, prodding it with a finger as if to make sure that it wouldn’t come back to life to chastise me.