Afterword

There are four different versions of this ‘Genesis Chapter 7.5’, all found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, none of which are accepted as canon by mainstream Christian or Jewish scholars. Even among lovers of apocrypha, they are suspected to be fakes. The radiocarbon testing last year has only muddied the waters. The relevant scroll fragments are not so new that they must be fakes, but are instead so old, often older than the surrounding material by decades if not centuries, that being fake is an easier explanation than whatever the truth might be. Of course, given the ongoing breakthroughs into Quantum Anthropology (which considers Dr. Birch’s Leonard Otto as an early forerunner), maybe the pseudo-truthfulness of it will resolve itself like all the other things that keep being impossibly true.

There is no clear end to the story of Victor Freestone. In the decade after 1876, people reported chance sightings of him or members of his entourage in Hong Kong, Dresden, Asunción - capitol cities where the presence of some or all of the entourage might stick out. None were substantiated - there are always foreigners in capitol cities that those crying Mad Cutter forgot to account for. There are dozens of these that continue all the way up until today, on average about as plausible as sightings of Elvis, Tupac or The Lost Spice Girl. They aren’t worth mentioning further.

There are more credible reports of figures who could be Victor Freestone et al in disguise. In Russia, an enigmatic healer visited the last of the Tsars to treat his hemophilic son, always cloaked and suspected to be using methods not-aligned with science or Christianity. He and his entourage quickly ingratiated themselves with the family, only to suddenly disappear a few days before the February Revolution; the behavior is not dissimilar to Lilith’s testing of rich families to see who deserved to survive. After the Second World War, a number of revolutionary movements in West Africa saw their leaders surviving combat wounds and assassination attempts that should have killed them; tracking the progress of miraculous recoveries uncovers seemingly unrelated cases of animal attacks, mass amnesia, and other odd happenings. Somehow, papers were smuggled into Europe that were key to perfecting the Great Glasskeeper Golem of Berlin, a major contributor to the Third Reich’s collapse in 1943. Somehow, a flock of pen-stealing seagulls in Kent led reporters to documents that would reveal the development of nuclear weapons to the world, the public backlash causing the British government to cancel plans to drop a bomb on North Vietnam at the US’s behest. Somehow, a US diplomat with ties to the Preservers was found dead in a hotel in Ocho Rios after leaving the Kingston Accords, last seen flirting with a coquettish woman spouting ribald humor. Never mind various articles published anonymously to academic journals providing insight on a variety of topics, several of them overlapping with The Protean Experiments (sent to an Irish academic publisher from Cairo in 1876). But again, no proof, just guesswork.

There were separate attempts to track down Theodore Birch. As the connection between The Mad Cutter and The Protean Experiments was not known until the mid-1900s, and wasn’t made fully clear until FBEI declassified the relevant documents in the 90s, the investigators were largely academics trying to confirm the source of the report as other academics attempted to find the legendary figures mentioned or reproduce some of the novel innovations. They had little success. Francois’s employees destroyed any records relating to Victor or his entourage in advance of the Marshal’s raids. The shipping magnate himself (eventually found to have fled to Haiti - it’s largely agreed upon that he was the secret financier behind the independence debt lawsuit) had all records of activities related to Freestone in his possession burned after his death, possibly as a final act of spite towards the United States. As such, most of the names of those who served on the ship have been lost. In the early 1900s, historians did find fourteen cases of men and women claiming that their fathers served on the ship until its final recorded landing in Cairo, finding their ways back West on an assortment of ships while the final seven went on alone. Even before the MSB letter was found in the 1940s, confirming that this was in fact the case, this was considered plausible. The ship was advanced enough that it could run with less crew than standard for a vessel its size, and with the advancements provided by Prometheus and Njord, and Lilith’s ability to command the creatures of the depths, it is possible that six people alone could sail it. Their accounts were useful to confirming that the encounters with Greek, Celtic and Norse figures of myth did happen, but they have little light to shed on Victor or any of the others who only boarded the ship in Pennsylvania. Multiple accounts referring to an aloof and blunt Black man would not have improved public perception of him.

There was also the wrecked ship off the coast of Yucatán that was identified as the EV Protean. Found in 1923, it was discovered by a group of fishermen, a barely-intact wreck that fell apart in a storm before photos could be taken. Based on descriptions and sketches from eyewitnesses, it was similar enough in appearance to Birch’s ship without any fantastical modifications, but with the ship destroyed, the strongest physical evidence is scratchings on a piece of flotsam that could be ogham graffiti. While there are those in the field who believe this is the ship in question - Yucatán is known to have been a location of interest for Birch and Victor’s father - the description could also match the DSV Starprow or the HMS Salamander, both lost in Central America in the 1910s. On a personal note, I find the idea that the ship somehow crashed distasteful.

Some measure of clarity would only be found in the late 1940s. A box of handwritten journals was shipped to what is now the University of Tehran, holding journals belonging to Victor Freestone, Geraldine Macy and others who delivered (with some pages removed or redacted). It would be the first of several ‘research packets’ shipped mysteriously to various universities throughout the world, showing up in New Mayapán, Egypt and Moscow - though based on radiocarbon dating, only Tehran got the original journals while everybody else got handmade copies. It would take several years for the journals to be identified and connected to both the EV Protean and The Mad Cutter of Henshaw, and the new details revealed never permeated the public consciousness, particularly in the United States where The Mad Cutter’s infamy remains the strongest. For the same reason, though the FBEI was legally obliged to release their information regarding their investigation into Henshaw, it was done quietly, during a Preserver administration, in the midst of an election that dominated the newsfeed.

The journals clarified why Victor’s story ended where it did, but not how it ended. Nothing in any of the packets has anything that dates past April 20, 1876 - the day they departed Cairo. A copy of the ship’s logbook was delivered to in Tehran, but it had entries after that date removed with a knife. Government records stop dead after Ohio when President Grant called off the investigation. Attempts to find who sent the packages failed, the trail jumping across Eastern Europe only to die in what is now Kazahkstan. Was it Victor, still alive somehow through workings of flesh or the fruit of Eden? Agents of Francois acting on some ongoing conspiracy? Their descendants, born under false names in some hidden part of the world, getting rid of what was collecting dust in their parents’ basement? New light on the past but still shadows on the future. It all still sputters out. What became of them? What became of my great-great-grandfather’s sister?

I said there are four different versions of the previous entry. In one, God grants them full access to the tree of life - but they are bound to the Garden of Eden as stewards of the sinless land. In another, Bean, in a final fit of jealousy, brains Victor when it looks like he will be given the fruit, and is subsequently marked as a new Cain, cursed to suffer alone for the sin of discarding a second chance. The ship is flung into the sky by the cherubim in the third version, before any of them can even plead their case; it dovetails worryingly with reports that the wrecked ship in South America looked like it fell on the rocks from directly above. The one that I chose is the oldest according to radiocarbon dating, which gives it credence, but it’s also the one that feels the most true to who Victor Freestone was. We will never know everything about him; even in his personal writing, he was guarded. He was certainly not a perfect individual, bound to paranoia and aloofness and other things that made him bad company. Still, we know above all else that he desired to heal the sick. That is the truth behind the Mad Cutter: a man who wanted to help despite himself and the world he lived in. I must imagine a God that would reward such a soul. I must imagine that somewhere on this Earth, he is cleaning up his workshop after saving someone’s life, that he will go visit his parents and Dr. Birch, or check on Geraldine and Matilda’s new project, or make sure Lamentations is on the straight and narrow. One day, with enough funding, I might not need to imagine, but until then I will muse on the man born from myth and story who chose humanity, who chose flesh and blood.