STUDYING YOU LIKE A SPECIMENT | Andrew | Once Upon a Tale

Working as Professor Doyle’s assistant — senior researcher of the Department of Natural Sciences with a specialisation in marine biology and ichthyology — was, tragically, a position utterly divorced from the sea.

More often than not, Andrew’s duties consisted of classifying vials of poorly preserved specimens, long since half-rotted due to improper storage, copying the professor’s notes in precise calligraphy, or, on particularly lucky days, dissecting some newly acquired mollusks. He was never invited to join expeditions. Sailors, who barely tolerated scientists to begin with, would certainly have laughed outright at the thought of bringing along a lanky assistant who wouldn’t even fit in a ship’s cot and couldn’t tell the bow from the flank.

He had no knowledge of knots, no grasp of rigging, and his attempts at nautical jargon were somewhere between embarrassing and blasphemous. And within the Royal Society, he was even less — a glorified errand boy. Doyle, though he relied heavily on Andrew’s expertise and help, made no effort to elevate his standing among their colleagues.

Andrew had one hope — to make a discovery of his own. Something unique. Something publishable. But what were the chances? The most he could afford was to pay a fisherman a few shillings for a half-hour trip along the coast, or to walk to Caramond Island during particularly dry low tides. Now and then, he added an ammonite to his collection — but ammonites no longer impressed anyone.

Doyle himself disliked expeditions. He required five hot meals a day, a stable temperature, and absolutely no motion sickness. Age had not been kind to the professor, and his stomach had grown steadily more resistant to life at sea. Not even increasing his feeding schedule to seven times a day managed to preserve his temper. His constant grumbling was enough to unnerve even the most seasoned — or elusive — of captains.

Still, the Royal Society insisted that he accompany a three-month expedition toward the Faroe Islands. Whalers had reported anomalies. Normally, no one took those seriously — these were men who swore they’d seen selkies, mermaids, and krakens large enough to blot out the moon. This time, however, the stories had been delivered with unusual conviction. The Society suspected the possible discovery of a new species of whale, or perhaps some other large marine mammal.

Andrew encouraged Doyle to accept. If the Society saw the professor’s knowledge as indispensable — if it needed Doyle specifically — that could only mean something extraordinary lay ahead. For Andrew, who was, of course, not expected on board, it would be a chance to hear accounts firsthand, to work with the resulting specimens, to participate in the fieldwork — even if only from afar.

The three months without daily orders from the professor dragged unusually slowly. Andrew was not formally reassigned during Doyle’s absence, and Mrs Doyle wasted no time in recruiting him as a temporary nanny. The number of faults she found in her husband’s character outpaced even Andrew’s most generous assessments. Between the shouting horde of children — there were eleven of them — and the endless domestic demands, Andrew found himself sympathising deeply with Mrs Doyle. All that remained to him was paperwork: old samples, old records, all of which he already knew. Intimately.

Upon the expedition’s return, chaos erupted through the department — no, the university at large. The typically empty corridors and halls were suddenly full. Members of the Royal Society had arrived in person, along with politicians, foreign guests, and even, inexplicably, the police.

Andrew’s heart threatened to burst from his chest. What on Earth could have stirred such commotion? He was desperate to know — to see, to touch, to study. But amid the whirlwind, he couldn’t get near Doyle for several days. Only after passing messages through several intermediaries did he finally receive a note, penned in the professor’s hand, requesting a private meeting. Late at night, as all the other time Doyle was packed with meetings.

“Now then, Mr Rawdon, you see—” Doyle grumbled heavily, pouring whisky from a cut-glass decanter into two mismatched tumblers. “Though perhaps we’d better start elsewhere. You’re curious about the expedition, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely, Professor!” Andrew sat upright, nearly bouncing in his chair before forcing himself to still. If there was even a chance of learning anything, he had to be careful. One misstep, one show of overeagerness, and Doyle would retreat behind his usual fog of grunts and evasions.

The professor huffed in what might have been approval and slid a glass across the desk — a heavy, old thing, littered with paper and correspondence. The amount of documentation alone had nearly doubled since Doyle’s return.

“The thing is,” Doyle began, “that the... creature we discovered—”

Creature. Oh God. Not 'whale'. Not 'dolphin'. Not 'jellyfish'. He said 'creature'.

“—exhibited aggressive tendencies—”

Andrew barely registered the words. He’d leaned forward, fidgeting slightly in his chair, already drowning in his own imagination.

“—we had to transport Professor Townsend under serious—”

New mollusk, maybe? They are weirdly shaped sometimes... What size? How aggressive?

“—the men refused to handle it further—”

Could it be a shark? A giant squid? One of the mythic cephalopods the whalers whispered about?

“Mr Rawdon?”

“A-ah! Apologies, Professor. Of course. I’m listening!” Andrew straightened so sharply it was as though he’d yanked himself out of a bucket of ice water. The world returned in crystalline focus, too crisp on the edges.

“Here.” Doyle nudged the glass closer. Andrew took a sip, flinching at the sharpness. The professor watched him keenly. “So,” he said. “What do you say? Will you try working with it?”

Andrew’s head snapped up. The room seemed to fall away or else stretch wide, enormous, unbearably empty. The desk between them felt like a plank across an abyss.

“Of course,” he said softly, caught off guard, “Of course, I—”

“Sign this.” Doyle interrupted, sliding a document across the table, tapping a thick finger on the blank line. Andrew glanced at the heading — “Release of Liability Form” — but didn’t read it. His mind was already spiraling, drunk on possibility. He signed. The ink bled slightly from his trembling hand.

The following morning, Doyle escorted him to the door of his private laboratory — a space that had always been strictly off-limits to everyone but the professor himself.

“Well then,” the older man sighed, giving Andrew a surprisingly comradely pat on the shoulder, as if bracing to lose the man whatsoever. “Best of luck, Mr Rawdon. And if anything happens... the medical kit’s in the drawer. Go on.”

He opened the door and ushered Andrew in.

The laboratory smelled faintly of brine and stale antiseptic. The floor was solid stone, scuffed and pitted, its age betrayed by layers of dried chemical stains. Cabinets lined the walls — tall, wooden, glass-fronted, and heavy with sample jars. A dissecting table stood at one side, its metal fittings darkened by time. But the centrepiece of the room was unmistakable: an enormous aquarium, nearly reaching the ceiling, secured with a heavy lock across the top. The water inside was cloudy — not quite green, not quite grey — and something moved within it. Alive.

He froze at the threshold, the air inside denser than it had any right to be — as if his mere presence had disrupted something ancient and better left untouched. The lock clicked shut behind him, not loudly, but with the finality of it was deafening. He didn’t turn, only stepped forward, slow and soundless, until the cloudy water within the towering tank stirred with a movement too deliberate, too wrong to belong to anything as simple as cod or herring.

His work as an Assistant of Professor Doyle in the laboratory of the University of Edinburgh was quite straightforward and, frankly, dull.

But not for Andrew.

To him, each mollusk dredged up by the shoreline expedition team held the thrill of a childhood revelation, as if he were five years old again, just discovering the existence of dinosaurs. The men who brought the specimens in — always returning from their field work caked in slit and silt, stray scales clinging to their thigh-high rubber boots — tended to look down on him. They made casual remarks about “the lab rat,” with their egos bolstered by the simple fact that they spent their days outdoors, unlike him.

He infused whimsy into every facet of his task himself. His sketches of half-living creatures were carefully painted in watercolours, though only requiring black and white. When labeling jars, he included small symbols of his own private taxonomy. Even when copying Professor Doyle’s notes in his careful calligraphy, he took the time to transcribe the man’s most ridiculous aphorisms into a leather-bound pocket notebook of his own. Once, the professor had referred to starfish as “many-armed one-arsed wonders,” and Andrew could never quite get over how universally applicable that phrase was.

The workroom itself was small and dusty, tucked away in the far corner of the Natural Sciences wing — hardly the stuff of dreams. His dreams belonged to Challenger. His dreams were years spent at sea, seeing whales and sharks with his own eyes in their natural habitats. But such adventures were reserved for men with wealth, notoriety, and influence. His own standing in the eyes of the Royal Society was of even less consequence than it was to the Queen herself. She, at least, collected taxes on his existence.

So he listened and read. He transcribed notes from expeditions in which he never sailed, sorted samples that often arrived half-rotted. The scientists aboard ships were few, perhaps two on a good voyage, and it was considered a miracle when at least one of them remembered that marine flora ought to be stored in saltwater. Or that living creatures required regular feeding. Some still sincerely believed that a box of amorphous, half-liquefied goo might, by Andrew’s hand, be coaxed back into a jellyfish after a three-day transport under July heat.

Only when the expedition included Professor Doyle himself were things different. A heavyset man with a grand belly, grand moustache, and an equally grand number of children, Doyle no longer favoured physical hardship. He now preferred his office chair or the parlour rooms of the Royal Society in London. Yet once a year or two, he would deign to accompany a short coastal expedition — sometimes a week, sometimes even a month — and on those rare occasions, Andrew’s eyes would all but light aflame.

It meant the majority of the samples would arrive intact — or at least, not decomposed. It meant he could pore over Doyle’s firsthand observations, and, if the professor was feeling particularly generous, even the sketches. Even water samples drawn from different depths. Even, if luck permitted, an attempt at underwater photography. The images were mostly illegible; the technology was still poor. But the idea of peering beneath the surface, into the ocean’s deepest layers—

The last such expedition, the one Doyle had most recently joined, returned late. Surprisingly so — the professor was known for his intolerance of delays. He’d forced the captains into cutting voyages short. The man typically enjoyed the first few days at sea, then quickly remembered just how miserable he found it. But this time, they came back six weeks after departure — a full three weeks beyond the schedule. And the secrecy surrounding the results was... startling.

For the first time, the large research table at the centre of the lab was not buried under specimens. For the first time, Doyle’s thick expedition journal did not land with a slap upon Andrew’s desk on the first working day back, accompanied by an irritable demand for a clean draft within forty-eight hours. For the first time, the professor did not spend entire afternoons complaining about the tasteless food and how the greenhorns kept vomiting over the rails.

This time, they all acted as if the expedition had never happened.

Andrew didn’t ask. But he listened. To whispers, half-caught. To talk about the basement room — the one beside the ice storage, where cadaver specimens were usually kept cold. He heard how these hushed conversations shifted, stuttered, and broke apart into empty small talk the moment someone realised he was within earshot.

At first, he tried to ignore it. A week. Two. After all, scholars had a right to protect their secrets from junior staff. Perhaps something unfortunate had happened — a mishap at sea, a Franklin-style humiliation (God rest his soul), like the man still known primarily as 'the one who ate his boots'.

But the door, now always locked, seemed to glow every time Andrew passed it on his way to fetch ice or take the shorter route through the basement during a storm. He felt, with mounting conviction, that something waited inside. Something that would change everything. Something that would unmake and remake him in a single moment.

The door was locked.

But Andrew, as an assistant expected to be invisible, silent, and ever-accommodating, held keys to nearly every room of the Natural Sciences department.

Including this one.

He stood before the door — unremarkable, almost blending into the wall of the dim corridor — long after his shift had ended. The corridor was still, but to Andrew, the door throbbed. It pulsed with his blood, echoed with the frantic rhythm of his heart as it fractured into pieces and spilled into the tips of his fingers, into his lips, into his ears.

Perhaps they had found the skeleton of a deep-sea creature that would rewrite all knowledge of existence? Perhaps — God — it was a military secret, hidden away in a forgotten Scottish department to avoid attention?

He reached for the ring of keys. His fingers trembled, but he forced them still, to keep them from jingling. No one would hear, he was sure of that, but still, his nerves flared like a child trying to steal a codfish from the kitchen table for dissection before his mother noticed again. He found the key, plain and dull, no different than the one for the ice room. This, after all, was a room meant for storing boxes, old ledgers, mops, and, perhaps, Andrew’s own hopes of a meaningful future.

He inserted the key and tried to turn it.

Damn.

It seemed the lock had been cha—

The key gave in and turned counterclockwise with a click. Louder than it should have been. Loud as thunder. Andrew thought — swore — that something on the other side had responded. He turned it again. Another click. Louder still, feeling like a gunshot right over his ear. A third.

He pressed the handle down, slowly, gently opening the door into a room dimly lit by two weak gas lamps. His own breath carried more charge than Tesla’s coils. He raised his eyes slowly, as though eye contact with the mystery might rupture the world.

The breath fled his lungs like floodwater through a broken dam.

There, at the far end of the room, stood an enormous aquarium — and something alive within it. Something that bore no resemblance to cod or herring.