He took a pouch from his pocket.
“Here.”
He tossed it to me, which was necessary because I was keeping a distance between us that was greater than the reach of his walking stick, it being the only visible weapon.
I opened the pouch. There was a scrap of silk inside.
“I think that’s yours,” he said. “I did you the courtesy of removing it from the scene. That’s the extent of my charity.”
I recognized it as the pattern on the scrap Marie liked to wear.
It was wet with something dark. The light from the lamps combined with the fog to make the crimson difficult to make out, but I knew blood when I touched it.
“You’ve killed her,” I said. It probably should have been a question, but it wasn’t.
“No, not me. He did. I just directed him to the right person. She was recently seen in your company, I believe? She told me as much; I found her not far from here, awaiting your arrival, and so drunk she didn’t much care that it was I that came instead of you, especially once I told her you and I were friends. That’s all it takes to get invited into a young woman’s home in these parts.”
“Where is she?”
“As I said: her home. Or her flat, or… I’m not aware of precisely what the rental agreement consists of, Jackie. It was private, which was exactly what had been missing in my prior experiments. I’d hoped that given an opportunity to fully explore his itch of madness, he would finally be freed. But even after an hour of cutting, he’s no less a gibbering lunatic than before.”
“I’m sure you’re disappointed,” I said. My heart was racing.
“Oh, I am! Mind, I didn’t expect to publish my results in either case, but it pains me to realize all of this work was for naught. No, that isn’t so: I learned that my thesis was untrue, and that’s valuable.”
“Can you tell me where her flat is? I should…”
I didn’t know what I should do, but something. I was still catching up.
“Jack, I promise, she is very much beyond earthly help. He made an extraordinary mess. He still has her heart, if you don’t believe me; I can show it to you, unless the idiot’s eaten it or something. You can’t save her, and if you’re the first person on the scene—”
“I’ll be the most likely suspect.”
“Yes. Although you already are.”
He was right, and I was being a fool. He’d already set me up to be the most probable suspect, which effectively nullified any accusation I might make against him. Add to that all of the things he couldn’t have known, such as that my family history was essentially a fabrication and I was called by two different names in different parts of the city. Despite being an American, his background had better provenance than mine.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s done. Regardless of what you decide to do with my gift, I’ve marked him down as a failed experiment. I’m going to drop him off in the river before he has a chance to get any more blood on the inside of the carriage. Nobody will miss him.”
“The killings end here, then.”
“They do.”
“Good. Now what the hell kind of gift are you talking about? This scarf?”
“No, no, no. The gift is a solid head start. Get out of town. She’s not lying out in some alley; it will be hours before anyone but you and I know she’s passed. And in honesty, if I were you I’d get out of Europe entirely; he really did make an awful mess, and the papers are going to turn this into quite a big deal. I suggest considering a trip to the New World.”
And that was what I ended up doing. I abandoned my business and whatever portion of my English accounts I couldn’t turn into currency immediately—most of my funds were in a Swiss account anyway—and fled the Isles stowed aboard a cargo ship bound for Germany. Six days later was aboard the S.S. Lahn, a steamship bound for New York from Breton.
So far as I know, Herman did exactly as he said, and dumped the actual killer in the Thames somewhere. I never wondered how this might be accomplished, as surely the man was quite large and violent, but maybe Herman just convinced the guy to take a swim with a brick tied around his neck or something. Either way, whether the man drowned, or was shoved back into whatever corner of Bedlam he came from, the killings did stop.
Later—much, much later—Scotland Yard’s investigative files became publicly available, as a consequence of the fervor over the Ripper case, which has inexplicably never died out entirely. The name I was using isn’t on the list. This could mean I overreacted when I fled town, but I’m pretty okay with the decision.
I still beat myself up about this entire episode. I was right there, I knew two of the victims and the guy who was responsible for the Ripper murders, and I was either too drunk or too clueless to recognize it early enough to make a difference. On my worst days, I blame myself entirely for all of it. On my best, I point out that maybe the murders did stop because I called Herman on it and besides, how could I have possibly anticipated all of that?
The truth is, I dwell on that period mainly because I was outwitted, outmaneuvered, and forced into self-exile from a place I kind of liked. I am almost never out-anythinged, because being the cleverest person around is how I’ve lived this long. I think I hate the reminder—and every time there’s a new Jack the Ripper theory (which is often), I’m reminded—that someone out there got the best of me.
I’d like to say I never saw Herman again, because he’s definitely on the list of people I wish I’d never met, much less encountered repeatedly. But I did see him again, and it didn’t go a whole lot better the second time around.
We’ll get to that.
Interlude (4)
From the journal of Dr. Lew Cambridge
Day fifty since the patient’s arrival.
* * *
The patient has provided additional insights into the meaning of her assertion that she “put her hand through” a goblin.
* * *
To gain even a modest understanding, I first required an explication of the process by which she arrived on this island.
* * *
She called the medium through which she traveled, “the veil”, which I believe is a non-scientific term. Adam recommended I consider a study of physics books for a better grasp, but neglected to offer exactly which physics books, encompassing what topics. Eve was equally unable to color in the details. But since her appreciation of what it is she does, and how, is on the distant side of mysticism, I’m not surprised.
* * *
As she described it, she can “travel up” and away from this dimension. If she goes far enough “up”, she reaches a level where she can no longer see what’s transpiring in this world, but if she remains close to—and again, this is deeply non-scientific—the edge of the veil, she can witness events, and walk through solid objects that exist in this world. Time, she claims, moves at a more rapid pace the further she travels “up”.
* * *
(Note: “up” is an arbitrary direction Eve uses, denoting little more than the fact that from her perspective, she grows larger, the deeper her travel in the veil.)
* * *
(I appreciate how ridiculous this sounds.)
* * *
In short, when just on the other side of this veil, she can observe the events of our world, happening at a slightly accelerated pace.
* * *
This is a particularly interesting assertion, because I’m told—both Eve and Adam volunteered this detail—that she spent a portion of our history “deep” on the “other side” of this veil. Thus, while she claims to be older than Adam by twenty- to thirty-thousand years, she may not have lived longer than he has.
* * *
With the capability of moving unseen and passing through solid objects, she can also defend herself by reappearing when a part of her is within someone or something, which is what she meant when she said she put her hand through a goblin: in an act of self-defense (this is assumed, not conf
irmed) and while on the other side of the veil, Eve positioned her hand in the chest cavity of a foe, and then exited the veil.
* * *
My theory is that when she did so, her body chemistry became commingled with that of the goblin’s, and that goblin happened to already be sick with our mystery pathogen.
* * *
To say this theory is medically suspect is to give it too much credit, but it matches the available facts. It further argues that Eve herself was not the one who was sick at all. The part of her that was goblin was what was sick, and once her body replaced the goblin cells with her cells, the sickness went with it.
* * *
This would get me laughed out of any medical school in the world if I were to offer it as a legitimate theory. But, so would most of my other work.
7
“What’s on your mind?” Mirella asked, as we watched the sunrise.
As is usually the case when one is smuggled out of a country, we were taking a less than ideal method of commercial travel. Jacques managed to get us on board a cargo ship across the channel. It departed from Le Havre and was docking in Brighton, which wasn’t where we wanted to go, although it was closer to it than Paris had been. But the ship met the minimum requirement of leaving at a time of night which corresponded neatly with the immediacy in which we preferred to leave France. To hook up with a vessel heading directly to Devon, we would have needed to wait another twenty-four hours, and that didn’t sound reasonable.
The difference between a dock in Brighton and one in Torquay (The nearest available dock in Devon) might have been more substantial a couple of centuries ago, when the on-land options consisted only of walking or riding by horse, but now they were just about a day apart by car.
“I was thinking about the last time I was in England,” I said.
“Is it a good story?” Thelonius asked, from a chair behind us. He was bundled up in a wool blanket someone from the crew lent to him. There was a chill, but I wasn’t feeling it as much as he was, clearly. I hadn’t spent part of my day being tortured for information, either, so I wasn’t really in a position to judge.
“You know, I think I’ve probably said this to every other imp I’ve met, but not everything is a story.”
“Why that is simply untrue.”
“Either way. It is a story, Thelonius, but not one I’m going to tell right now. I don’t like the ending.”
“Then change it!”
Mirella groaned, and walked halfway down the railing so as to position herself out of earshot. Imps can be exhausting, and we were both already pretty exhausted.
“You know what the problem is?” I said. “I know what you’re saying, because I’ve spend plenty of time with your kind in the past. If I told you that a few minutes ago, I left the deck to go to the head, then came back again, and that’s all that happened, you’d probably want to know if there was a dragon involved.”
“You exaggerate to sell your point, and I find that fantastic!”
“I’m sure you do. The thing is, there wasn’t a dragon. I didn’t meet anyone along the way, I wasn’t nearly crushed by loose cargo below-deck, and I didn’t have to wait for anyone to get out of the john before I went in. Nobody forgot to flush. I washed my hands. There’s nothing else to say. And…let me stop you, because I can see it dancing along your eyebrow, the next thing you’re going to say. It’s okay that nothing happened. I could try to turn that little non-event of a thing into a story that sounds far more interesting than it actually was, but I have no reason to do that.”
“No reason! But this is life!”
“Sure. And life is mostly boring. Some of us happen to like that about life.”
He wanted to interrupt again. The only way to shut up an imp is to talk longer than them, so I kept going.
“Look, I don’t know how old you are,” I said. “I have a feeling I’d have trouble accepting whatever answer you gave, because I wager you’re not sure yourself. But it’s not as old as I am. I’ve been alive for sixty millennia, at least, and I’m telling you, if I tried to turn every dull moment into a story of its own, I wouldn’t have made it half that long. What I don’t think any imp has ever understood is that something happening is important to the rest of us in part because it’s not nothing. If something is always happening, it devalues what actually happens, do you understand? I’m far more interested in the things that actually happened than the things that didn’t. Whether I like the ending or not.”
Thelonius, to his credit, didn’t respond right away, but appeared to take everything in and give it a good think.
“Can I tell you a story, Adam?”
I think I probably sighed audibly.
“A short story, I promise,” he added. “Pertinent to the moment.”
We were coming in to port, but it looked like we had some time. Docking ships always take about four times longer to tie up than it feels like they should.
“All right. Go ahead.”
“Very good. Once upon a time…”
“Oh, please no.”
“You said you’d let me tell the story.”
“Sorry.”
“Once upon a time, there was a great king. His lands, though modest, were rich with natural goods. The state’s taxes were also modest, his subjects were well-fed and content, and his queen and children were healthy and well-loved. But, he was bored. Terribly, terribly bored. And in his boredom, he cast his eye on his neighboring kingdom, a kingdom where his younger brother was ruler by marriage.
“He started to wonder if this other kingdom was in fact larger than his own. And so he called the royal mapmaker to his chambers and put the question to him. After a lengthy consultation, the king and the mapmaker concluded that yes, his younger brother’s kingdom was indeed larger.
“The king then decided that this was a great effrontery, and considered if he should do something about it.”
“He could get the mapmaker to draw a better map,” I said.
“Yes, he could! Indeed, one could argue that this is precisely what the mapmakers responsible for our current world maps have done. But that is not what this mapmaker did, and for an important reason: he saw that no answer other than the one he gave would mollify the king. And so, he gave the answer the king wanted to hear, rather than the truth, which was that the kingdoms were almost perfectly equal in size.”
“The moral of this story appears to favor my point.”
“Only because I haven’t finished! The king took the map to his high counselor, and asked him what would happen if he, the king, were to lay claim on enough territory to ensure that his kingdom was larger than their neighbor. His counselor responded that such an action would surely constitute an act of war, to which his king replied, ‘splendid!’ And then he asked his counselor to plan for war.
“In this, the king’s high counselor was no doubt exaggerating as well, as the kingdom was on good terms with its neighbor. Assuming the land was taken peacefully, it would at worst trigger furious acts of diplomacy. In his attempt to tell the king what he thought the king needed to hear—instead of the truth—he inadvertently told the king precisely what he wanted to hear. And now the kingdom was planning for a war.”
“Telling the better story instead of the truth got him into trouble,” I said. “Again, you’re making my point for me.”
“No, that is not the point. The point is, regardless of what is true, a good story-teller should know what his audience wants to be true, before he even begins to speak. But this isn’t the end of the story either.
“There was more advice to be heard, but none could do much to temper the king’s ardor for a war. The queen tried to reason with his sense of brotherly fealty, in ignorance of the fact that he happened to greatly dislike his brother. His generals tried to point out that the army’s troops were ill-prepared for a war, which only made him more resolute. His tax collectors pointed out that the income from the new lands wouldn’t offset the increase in taxes that would be necessa
ry to feed a standing army, which only encouraged the king to consider taking even more land.
“Finally, the court jester came to an audience with the king.”
“An imp, no doubt,” I said.
“Of course. All the best were! The jester said that he understood the king was making plans for war. When the king affirmed this, the jester said that he would be happy, in the king’s absence, to fulfill all of the other royal duties.
“The king laughed, thinking of how little he actually had to do from day-to-day when not planning to go to war, and told the jester that this would be fine, if indeed the jester could think of anything that wouldn’t have been just as well left undone.
“The jester then proceeded to describe a single day in the life of his liege. Every step, every greeting, every nod and tick and gesture, every signature and announcement, and meeting, and so on. And he did so in such a way that the king was enthralled. More, he realized that no man could possibly be bored with such a life as this, so full as it was.
“And so, he declined the jester’s offer. Soon after, he announced that a war was surely an unreasonable thing to do, given how occupied he was with his regular duties. Then he had the royal mapmaker killed, and everyone was happy again.”
I laughed.
“You need to work on that ending,” I said.
“Parables are the hardest,” he said. “They have no punchline.”
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