Beautifully Dead - Chapter 39
An Immortal Affections serialized novel
May 4-5, 2025
Fredericksburg, Virginia
The Merriweather Medical Research Foundation was quiet at two in the morning. Not exactly silent—the climate systems hummed behind the walls, cycling filtered air through corridors built to preserve things that should not have survived as long as they had—but quiet in the way of a building with no one else in it.
Elijah Merriweather sat alone in his private office on the basement level, behind the biometric lock that responded only to him, looking at his own handwriting on a centuries old document.
The journal lay open under a reading lamp turned low. He did not truly need the light. Had not for ages, really. But the habit persisted—one of dozens of small performances he maintained even when alone, always conscious that he might be observed.
It was fortunate that he did not leave quite all of his research with Eleanor, before being forced to go into hiding after the Civil War.
Amelia had found enough of James’s notes in the house to be dangerous—the clinical observations, the documentation of Eleanor’s decline. If Eleanor had the later journals as well, the ones that followed her transformation, there would be no ruse left to maintain.
And, he had to admit, Eleanor had been careful—in her own way. Or perhaps simply unwilling to keep a record of the worst of what he had done. Either way, what Amelia had was incomplete.
What sat on this desk was not.
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March 29, 1862.
18 AD
I had not anticipated this degree of resistance.
The others, without exception, accepted the reality of feeding within hours of the first hunger. Their moral reservations crumbling under the power of instinct.
Subject E.C. is markedly different. After the first instance of violence, she has been refusing to consume any kind of nourishment. Her superior intellectual faculties show no sign of impairment. They remain remarkably intact despite the deprivation. She is starving herself through sheer force of will.
This level of control is truly extraordinary.
It’s possible that the longtime exposure prior to her death preserved her more intimate self—even during the most primal stages of the transformation.
If so, this would have significant implications on my future research.
As fascinating as her behavior is to observe, It also poses a very immediate problem. I can confidently say that her rational coherence has been deteriorating. It is my theory that, If she persists in her convictions, there will be a decay of faculties.
I understand her scruple, she fears that by accepting sustenance, it will become of her what did of the other survivors—ravenous, unthinking, changed beings.
I fear she will become lost entirely—the deterioration, should it continue, admitting of no recovery.
There is no concrete proof of this, of course, and yet I am hesitant to pursue that line of research. If I were proven right it would be… It would be a considerable waste of a remarkable intellect.
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Another page.
The paper tugged at his fingertips with the slow decay of decades.
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April 3, 1862.
23 AD
Subject E.C. fed today.
Her hands trembled throughout. She did not speak to me afterward.
The examination of her mental faculties which I administered this evening. Verbal faculty: unimpaired. Geometric reasoning: exceeding the faculty as measured during fever. She is, if anything, sharper than before her stubborn refusal to eat. Her body required the feeding. Her mind, it appears, persisted without it longer than I would have believed possible.
I had expected her to be rational about this. I know her to be rational. What I did not account for is that rationality, in her case, includes a moral framework rigid enough to override self-preservation. She would rather have destroyed herself than accept what she has become.
I find this fascinating.
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He paused on that entry, reread it.
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I find this fascinating.
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Fascinating.
He remembered writing that sentence. The pen had moved without hesitation—the observation was genuine, cleanly felt, unapologetic.
She had refused to eat for weeks. She had nearly ruined the very thing that made him excited to study her in the first place—her mind.
Without the faculty intact, she would have been indistinguishable from the others. Most died in the fever. Those who didn’t emerged into something he could only describe as a vacancy—the body continuing, the hunger present, the mind evacuated. Appetite wearing the shape of a person. In seven hundred years, the third outcome had been rare enough to count.
Eleanor had woken angry and entirely herself.
That was the difference. Not that she survived—he had seen survival before. It was that he understood, for the first time, why. The priming had held her higher faculties long enough for the rest of her to adapt around them, before hunger could collapse everything into instinct. She had given him a mechanism. A direction.
What came after Eleanor was entirely a different kind of work.
He was finding it more difficult to imagine Amelia in those terms—as an experiment awaiting an outcome. The categories kept slipping.
Today, as his own words stared at him from the past, he thought of a similar mind, a similar brilliance, and he realized he’d not be able to write about Amelia, as he did about Eleanor.
To think about Amelia as he had thought about Eleanor.
Eleanor Caldwell had been a subject. Followed, nurtured, coveted. A problem to be solved. As a fascinating deviation from the expected pattern. There was no pity in his words for what she was going through. None of the approximation of human warmth he sometimes performed for the benefit of others.
It was the pure, uncomplicated fascination of a scientist watching something he had never seen before.
He had tried to write about Amelia in that way in his private notes recently—the clinical language, the measured observations, the careful distance. And the distance kept slipping. Her name kept replacing “the subject.” Her symptoms kept becoming “how she’s feeling.”
He kept noticing things that had no research value at all—the way she held her coffee cup with both hands because of the temperature shifts she was surely experiencing by now, the way she tilted her head when she was listening, weighting his truths in her mind. Working through him as he was working through her.
Eleanor had remarked upon it.
You sound different when you talk about Amelia. She’d said.
He had not asked what she meant.
He wondered if she was right as he continued to flip through his journal. The following pages were denser. Feeding schedules. Regular light tolerance tests at twelve-hour intervals. Examination of mental faculties—recolleciton of language, perception of distance and relation, a trial of logical faculty of his own devising.
Eleanor’s performance had climbed consistently through the first month after she started accepting food. Her mind sharpened as her body changed, following the pattern he had observed again and again over the centuries.
Faster and deeper than even his own had been
He closed the journal and placed both hands flat on the desk.
It was a sturdy piece. He had built it himself shortly before the Revolutionary War when he was known as Dr. William Merriweather. The grain dark with age and oil.
Everything lasted, in his world. Everything except the people.
Something about Eleanor’s transformation had awakened him to his own journey throughout the years.
A man born in a Scotland village in 1306, years before Pestilence swept the country killing him amongst many others. Before his own confused and hungry awakening. His own, and none other’s.
Back when he was known as Angus Merriweather.
He’d barely escaped being burned alive then, and only thanks to his brother’s intervention.
He had died so many times after that one. Drowned, burned, and even succumbed to plague—again. Each death allowing him to become someone new. Miles. Robert. Samuel. Rory. Peter.
So many different lives. But only one had truly left a mark on him after the first one—somewhen back in the 1600s.
He was known as Francis the Brute then. A title given to him after the English had killed the love of his life—Catriona. After he had exacted his vengeance.
Catriona. Whose name meant pure in a language he was forgetting how to speak.
He had loved her in a way that his science could never explain. Kept loving her In a way he couldn’t explain. She made him a better man, and he wanted to be that man again.
Every fiber in his being missed the way she looked at him. She saw the man hiding within the monster. Under that gaze, for the first time in centuries, he had felt like Angus once more.
He wanted to feel that way again, and he knew he needed her for that. To this day, he hadn’t figured it out how.
More than three centuries spent trying to understand why the affliction gave some immortality yet killed others, so that he could go back and do it right.
The only problem was that the affliction moved in cycles. Decades of silence, then sudden emergence—following wars, famine, poverty. Always where the bodies were dense and the oversight thin.
Lucky for him humanity had provided, again and again in the past.
When the Edinburgh cluster broke, he had been waiting a while.
He had grown comfortable in being Elijah, which was dangerous. Comfort led to exposure. Exposure led to questions he could not answer without dismantling everything.
And Amelia.
The gap between James Merriweather and Elijah Merriweather was a century and a half of intervening “ancestors”—the fiction that kept the family legacy plausible, that let him operate the Foundation in his own name while pointing to the founder as a long-dead forebear.
The fiction held because no one had ever examined James’s handwriting and Elijah’s in the same room, under the same light, with the trained eye of a woman who studied dead men’s letters for a living.
Amelia could be doing exactly that in her hotel room. She did not merely read documents. She studied the person behind the pen. She found the seams between what someone wanted to say and what they meant. She had told him so herself, in the truck, as calmly as describing a hobby.
The question was not whether she would figure it out. It was when. And what he could do, if anything, to slow her down.
And yet, the risk of being finally exposed offered a thrill in itself.
His phone vibrated at 5:17 AM. Not a text. A call.
He looked at the screen. The name read Dr. E. Caulfield but the contact photo was one he had taken himself, decades ago, in a garden in Zurich. He answered on the second ring.
“We need to talk.”
Her voice. Even after all these years he imagined he could hear the echo of the woman who had awakened in a makeshift morgue in Richmond. The accent had changed—educated now, continental, layered with six languages and a career’s worth of authority—but the cadence beneath had not.
Eleanor spoke the way she had always spoken.
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to be continued…
© 2025-26 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake & Joe Gillis. All rights reserved.