The Doctor of Tears

Avenham Harris was a doctor of eyes.

An eminent oculist of the highest standing, a giant among the ophthalmologists peering into the eyes of the Capital.

A specialist of nasolacrinal systems and their hydrology, he was the foremost expert in diagnosing and treating conditions and predicaments of what the layman would call 

.... the tear ducts.

To his patients he was a god, a nimble-fingered olympian who could rid them of every conceivable agonising blockage and excruciating encrustation. 

His waiting list was legendary and King Edward himself had sought the doctor's solace with a regular royal drain.

This regal approval and his general aloofness made Harris's peers both respectful and resentful in equal measure.

Professionally Harris was a known quantity, known somewhat cruelly as the Ductor, but his private life was another matter entirely.

It was just that, entirely private and his colleagues along that most prestigious of medical postcodes had no idea as to what he did behind those sumptuous mahogany doors of his enviable address of No.1 Harley Street.

What they did know was that tragedy had struck Avenham Harris some years earlier. 1898 to be exact when, taking the air together, his own beloved wife Florentine had died suddenly and terribly one dreadful Autumn Sunday, when a brewer's drey ran amok in Knightsbridge brutally robbing her of her tender life and Avenham Harris's one true love. She had died in his arms, her skull crushed and her vision gone. Her final bleeding tears seering his mind shut as they fell down his cheek into his tortured mouth.

Since the accident Dr. Harris had withdrawn completely from the soirees and balls of  London Society Florentine had enjoyed so much and was never seen again outside of the walls of his pre-eminent practise. He chose to work industriously and grieve alone becoming a mere misted shadow of his former self.

His patients respectfully kept quiet about his deceased wife, their English reserve protecting them from any embarrassing discourse with the good doctor. Besides, he was far too diligent an oculist to veer from medical matters, so much so that he focused ever more on the hydrological cycle of the eye. The grainy sleep, the sludgy rheum, the crystalline discharge, the subtle fluids. 

But above all of these issues he coveted a singular secretion more than any other, namely, hemolacria, the uniquely rare tears of blood, the tears his darling wife Florentine had wept as she lay fatally wounded in his hands.

To Avenham Harris these were sacred tears, the very essence of grief and a beautiful life cut profoundly short. They were the red veils of Heaven and the iron footsteps of his Wife's path and the very waymarks to her grieving soul.

His too. 

His and her salvation lay in those crimson waters and he would do anything in his power to re-capture that terrible euphoria of tasting Florentine's tears of blood.

As he assiduously collected the watery deposits of his many patients in meticulously labelled glass phials, a rumour spread among them and eventually the medical circle too, that the esteemed Avenham Harris was displaying signs of odd behaviour and in the vernacular of the time, losing his marbles. 

Little did they know that the eye specialist had indeed developed strange occupations and the strangest of all was the body in his cellar.

The body of his dead wife Florentine.

Having duped the funeral director with a sack of sand in the coffin, Harris had secretly procured her corpse from the morgue almost immediately after the accident and hidden it deep below his practice in the Victorian basements. 

In God's name to what end his curious peers might enquire should they have known, but the answer would not have been pleasant for them to hear or indeed envisage, for Dr. Harris had been collecting Florentine's red tears ever since she had passed in his arms that fateful day in Knightsbridge. After tasting this holiest of waters, his compulsion began at the scene itself and taking a small empty bottle he had in his jacket he decanted his first divine volume from Florentine's tear ducts, which he consumed that evening sat by the fireside in her favourite seat and recited her most beloved prayer.

Inevitably as decomposition set in, the Doctor's clandestine milking began to suffer as the pipes and runnels of his Wife's broken skull started to harden and dessicate. Since he drank the fluid the same day, in the evening by the hearth, his supply was empty and he felt the first pangs of a new sorrow and the physical strictures of withdrawal from his necessary libation.

His lachryphagia was unquenchable.

Harris was beside himself with anguish and torment, his soul aching for continued reunion with his darling Florentine and his palette screaming for its ferrous rheumy nightcap.

With no expense spared the once-esteemed medic commissioned the services of restoration men to drain the tears of the mortuary's fresh incumbents, the more violent the end the better.

Chatter abounded about the wild look in the Doctor's eyes these days, his awkward siphoning of his patients' weeping as he explained, cruelly, that there was nothing he could do save store a sample for some future research.

When the red vineyard of the district's dead did nothing for his compulsion, Avenham Harris turned to a more select and altogether more dangerous source, those shadowy figures who for a price procure rare and nefarious relics for the curiously wealthy of the Capital, the rich collectors of the arcane who ponder the Pit behind varnished desks.

Bring me the tears of a Stigmata.

Harris handed over the bag of cash and the bargain was set late one night in the darkness of his porch.

He waited and waited until at last the nocturnal purveyor knocked and gave the twitching Doctor a clear receptacle containing purportedly the devout grue from a believer's pious puncta.

Avenham Harris waved the man away and shambled into his unkempt parlour, the glass phial quivering in his hand. 

He devoured it's contents.

And felt nothing.

In pain, both physical and of the spiritual mind, he retreated to the cellars and begged his decaying love for some comfort, some sacrifice, some tears.

In that darkness, the gut of the building's reeking foundation, the assailed medic gave in to his distemper and fierce slaps of hopelessness punished his flailing mind.

I am indeed in Hell's dominion and I fear I am losing you Florentine my darling.

He wept and as his own sorrowful drops mixed with the entropy of his beloved his thoughts turned to darker regions still.

Yes.

If not there then here.

But we will need a harbinger, a confluence, a carrier of souls.

That's it.

Once more the now maddening Doctor reached out to the dealer of relics and made a request of such enormity, such danger that the sum of a thousand pounds was required forthwith.

The following night the familiar knock and another decanter transfered.

I do not wish to see you again my good man.

Nor I Doctor. I shall be leaving London this very night. It's not safe here anymore after getting you .... That!

The manic Harris staggered to his wife, unwittingly knocking over an oil lamp, which set the ancient timbers alight. 

Oblivious to anything else, Harris tipped some of the dark bubbling liquid onto Florentine's still lips and then frantically into his own.

He slumped down by the gurney, where his spirit finally collapsed and he thought he glimpsed the rising flames of their dreadful destination.

Look Florentine, look, the fires! It's worked!

Together! 

We shall be in Hell together forever!

It's marvellous! Look! 

I have him everything I owned, everything so we could drink the rarest of all the world's wept issues my darling, yes, the damnably bloody tears of .... 

Satan himself!

Ha ha ha ha ha!