A butcher

This started out as a writing exercise in which I have to write about hands in three different genres. This first one was supposed to be horror. I think I got off track with the hands part, but hopefully it's still entertaining:

He thumbed through the pages steadily, the stink of chloroform and blood seeping into the thick paper. Smears were left, dark brown after the bright red splashes that coloured the earlier pages.

The lamp cast a harsh yellow light, the old globe brushed of the dust that filled the rest of the small storeroom. Instruments hung the walls, edges dull in what Edgar used to call the “fright light” when he was a child. A doctor, like his father, he was introduced to the trade at a young age. These were his father’s anatomy books. This had been his surgery. Edgar had come into the room, and the harsh light had brought to life flesh and blood and the screams of women.

He shook his head at the memory. A silly boy he had been. He turned back to his pages, but still couldn’t find the exact paragraph.

Retainers of the soul, his father used to say, books and their material. He used to say that a book retains not only its writer’s soul, but also those of its readers. He was a wistful man.

A baker might leave the smell of dough and chocolate. The heavy-handed thumb of a serious man, a lawyer or banker perhaps, would leave a dent in the corners. A woman’s perfume might cling and whisper as another reader opened the folds.

Edgar seldom bothered to think what future readers of these books might make him out to be, but today the thought persisted, though not unpleasantly. He looked at the smears, and underneath one such he finally made out the tiny writing of the embalming section. Perhaps they would suspect he was a doctor. The imaginative mind might stretch farther, touch his real indent upon these pages. They might figure him for a butcher. 

He glanced behind him at the form on the surgery table, the mottled tourniquets, the drip of blood. Besides the hum of the light and the crinkling of paper as he thumbed, the steady drip was the only sound in the room.

A butcher. Edgar smiled.

“My father taught me well,” he breathed.