by Kat Ross
“How can you be sure?” John asked.
“‘Cause she came up to see me.” The woman jerked a thumb toward her second-floor flat. “Said she’d left a bit of a mess and gave me a couple of extra bucks to clean it. Most wouldn’t of, but she did. Becky was honest like that.”
“What kind of mess?”
She scratched her hair, which was pulled into a loose bun. “There were a strange smell, like rotten eggs. She’d butchered a rooster, though not any way I’d seen before. Its neck weren’t wrung. Feathers were scattered about. That’s all.”
“Were there gentlemen with her?” John asked.
“I saw two. One looked like a real swell. I’ve seen the other around here before. They left first.”
“Can we see it?”
She squinted at us and sucked her yellowed teeth. “That’ll be another buck.”
John produced the bribe this time, and she led us inside and down a narrow, rickety set of stairs just as Brady had described. It grew very dark at the bottom and the proprietress took a kerosene lantern down from a hook on the wall and lit it. I could still detect the faint aroma of sulphur in the dank air.
“Just through here,” she said, pushing open a wooden door. “It’s a funny thing. The whole building used to be crawling with roaches. But since that night, I ain’t seen a one of ‘em.”
The space that lay beyond was perhaps sixteen feet square and eight feet high. The table and chairs used in the séance were gone, replaced by a filthy straw mattress that had been pushed up against one wall. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and though I could see a single shaft of daylight through that tiny slit, the overall impression was of standing at the bottom of a grave.
We clustered in the doorway for a moment, reluctant to enter any further into the room. Then Edward surprised me by striding forward and bending down.
“Would you be kind enough to bring the light over here, madam?” he said politely, and the landlady was so flattered at being called madam that she fairly skipped over to him.
“What have you found?” John asked, as we gathered round a spot on the floor.
“I’m not sure,” Edward said. “What do you think, Harry?”
I peered in the dim light, then crouched down, heedless of my green silk dress. “It looks like a… scorch mark,” I said.
I took out one of the same envelopes I had used to scrape up the ash from Straker’s flat and swept a small amount of the blackened dirt inside. Then, behind me, John gave a soft cry. He’d found another mark. We fanned out and discovered no less than five of them, equidistant from each other in a rough circle. I gathered a bit from each and was tucking the packets away when John seized my wrist, bringing it to his nose.
“The smell, Harry, it’s coming from the dirt.”
I frowned. I’d almost stopped noticing it. “The sulphur, you mean?”
“Yes. And there’s another word for it.” He released my hand and, for the first time in all the years I’d known him, John looked genuinely disturbed. “Brimstone.”
Chapter 5
For the next fifteen minutes, we examined the cellar thoroughly, but there was little more to discover there. I noted some dark reddish stains in the center of the room that could have been dried blood, but that simply corroborated both the landlady and Brady’s account of a rooster being slaughtered. I knew I wasn’t alone in craving some fresh air. The place had such an oppressive atmosphere that it seemed time stood still. We could have been down there for minutes or hours.
Our hostess had beat a retreat back to her second floor flat as soon as it became clear that no more money would be forthcoming. John kept glancing with undisguised longing at the stairs, but he gamely helped Edward and me to examine every inch of the walls, floor and ceiling before gathering up the lantern and following in her footsteps.
“Revelation,” John said as we piled into the barouche and the driver cracked his whip, urging the horses onward towards the relative safety of Broadway. “I don’t know the exact quote, but it’s the bit about the lake of fire and the mark of the beast. Sulphur and brimstone.”
“She probably set it up as some kind of effect,” I said. “Rickard, I mean. That could have been the foul wind Brady spoke of.”
“Perhaps,” John said. He still looked troubled.
“At least we know he was telling the truth, about some of it, at least,” I said. “John, don’t you know a few of the fellows who work at the morgue?”
Dusk was settling over the city streets, the gaslights flickering on with a warm yellow glow. On that fine summer evening, the dense forest of telegraph and electrical poles that had crippled the city during the Great Blizzard was enjoying its final lease on life. In less than a year, they would all be felled as the lines moved underground.
John nodded absently. “Yes, I’ve gone to observe autopsies there on several occasions.”
“Why don’t you go down tomorrow and see if anyone’s claimed Becky’s body?”
“It’s Paul’s birthday, but I can go in the afternoon.” Paul was one of his brothers. “It also might be worth another trip to Leonard Street to talk with Straker’s neighbors. See if they remember any visitors. I feel as though the man is a cipher.”
“Excellent idea,” I said. “Just be careful. We’ve been lucky so far, but outsiders asking too many questions can get into serious trouble down there. Now, Edward. Do you think any of the girls you know subscribes to the Banner of Light?” This was the most popular weekly publication of the Spiritualist movement. “We need a listing of local mediums.”
“I can certainly ask around,” he replied.
“If you could do it this evening, we’ll get cracking first thing. Why don’t you come by around ten o’clock tomorrow and pick me up?”
Edward promised to do so, and took me home first, as John’s Gramercy Park address was on the way to his own townhouse on East Thirty-Seventh Street. Mrs. Rivers was bustling about the kitchen and humming to herself when I entered. The mouth-watering aroma of blueberry pie emanated from the coal oven.
“Did you have a nice walk in the park, dear?” she asked as I pulled a chair up to the kitchen table. “I see you made yourself lunch.”
“Yes, lovely,” I lied. “How was your afternoon?”
“Oh, I popped by Fulton Market for some fresh berries and cream and then I met a friend for tea. Why, what on earth happened to your dress?”
I looked down and noticed for the first time that I was absolutely filthy from the waist down.
“I tripped and fell in the street. But I’m perfectly fine.” The strangeness of the day, combined with the heat in the kitchen, made me suddenly very sleepy. “Tell me, Mrs. Rivers. Do you believe in hell?”
She gave me a squinty look, like she was wondering if perhaps I might have struck my head after all, but our housekeeper was used to strange questions by now. “Hmmm. That’s a tickler. I’m a good Christian woman, of course, and I do believe in Judgment Day. Those who are virtuous and do right by others shall go to their everlasting reward.”
“But what about the bad ones?” I said. “The sinners? What happens to them?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Have you been reading Connor’s abominable stories? I don’t know how the boy sleeps at night. There was one about a man who got eaten by cats. Cats!”
“I haven’t, but it sounds like you have,” I said, grinning.
“Oh, I’d never!” she exclaimed, but the flush in her cheeks said otherwise. “Now, as for sinners. Well, the Bible says they will go away to face eternal punishment. You know that from Sunday school, Harry.”
“I know what it says. But do you believe it? The stuff about…fire and brimstone? Demons?”
Mrs. Rivers hesitated, her dark, clever eyes searching mine, and for a brief moment, I wondered if I’d misjudged her all these years and she wasn’t the doddering old lady she appeared to be. Then she stood up and used hot pads to lift the pie out of the cast iron stove. She set it to cool on the windowsill, softl
y humming Lift High the Cross.
Mrs. Rivers poured us both glasses of iced tea and sat back down.
“In my seventy-two years in this world, I’ve seen many things. Extremes of both good and evil. Take the Kelly family of Kansas. I read all about them in the papers last year. On the surface, perfectly respectable ranchers. They often welcomed travellers for a meal at their farmhouse in that desolate region called No-Man’s-Land. The mother would cook while the 18-year-old daughter Kit would chat with the visitor. Soon, the father and son would appear, and all would gather round the dinner table.”
I vaguely recalled hearing the name Kelly, but I had been sick with a bad fever for several weeks just before Christmas of 1887 and missed out on much of the news at that time.
“What do you think happened next?” Mrs. Rivers said, primly sipping her tea.
“I suppose they were murdered horribly?” I guessed.
“Indeed. But in a most ingenious fashion. You see, the poor man’s chair would be placed above a carefully concealed trap door, and at the signal, a switch would be thrown and they would plunge into the Kellys’ pitch-black basement. The lucky ones died in the fall. The others…” She trailed off and shook her head. “Well, when the family fled one day, some of their neighbors came poking around. They soon discovered the remains of three people in the cellar, so decomposed that they could not be identified. Four more bodies, including a woman, were found buried beneath the stable, and three more near the barn.”
I imagined suddenly falling into a lightless hole filled with rotting corpses and felt a shudder of revulsion pass through me.
“And they were hardly the first,” Mrs. Rivers chattered on. “The Benders—surely, you’ve heard of them? Kansas, as well. What is it about Kansas? In any event, ordinary churchgoing people. Except that they lured visitors to sit in front of a curtain placed so that the back of the poor soul’s head made a slight indentation, at which cue John Bender Sr., who was standing behind the curtain, would bash them on the back of the skull with a sledgehammer, toss them down into a hidden pit, and then slit their throats. Just to be sure, you know. Nine in all! Including an infant and an eight-year-old girl. And they got away with it. A posse went after the Benders, but they were never found.”
Mrs. Rivers let this unnerving fact hang in the air for a moment. “What can we call such creatures as the Kellys and the Benders? They look like us, speak like us, but their hearts are as black as the anonymous graves of their victims. Are such beings born or created? I don’t know. But you asked me before if I believe in the devil.” She smiled. “The answer is yes, dear, I do. And so, I think, should you.”
We both turned as Connor entered the kitchen in his usual style, not unlike a small, scabby tornado.
“I smell pie,” he said, collapsing into a chair.
“It’s cooling,” Mrs. Rivers said sternly. “And it’s for after supper.”
He scowled and took something out of his pocket. It was about eight inches long and pinkish-grey and tapered to a point at one end. He began coiling it around his index finger as Mrs. Rivers looked on in mounting horror.
“What is that?” she asked faintly.
“This?” Connor dangled it so the end brushed his bare knees.
“Yes, that. Is it…?
“The tail of a Norwegian rat?” He admired his prize with the intense gratification of a prospector who just stumbled over a vein of pure gold. “Yes, it is. And a right beastly rat it was too. Me and the lads found it in an alley by the waterfront. Course it was dead a’ready. But Billy had his knife so…”
“Out!” Mrs. Rivers bellowed.
“But—”
“Now! Harry, take him to the garden and hose him down! See that thing is disposed of.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Come on, Connor.”
Mrs. Rivers was muttering something about the Black Plague as I hauled him out of the kitchen. The moment we were out of earshot, he grabbed my arm and started pulling me up the stairs.
“I knew that would do her,” he whispered. “I got news. We need to talk.”
I followed Connor up to his attic room, where I found a grubby kid sitting on the single bed.
“This is Billy Finn,” Connor said. “Billy, this is Myrtle’s sister, Harry. Tell her what you told me.”
From the gaps in his front teeth, I guessed that Billy Finn was about eight years old. He had a pug nose and curly brown hair.
“Pleased to meetcha,” Billy said, putting away the penknife he’d been using to clean his big toenail, which stuck through a gaping hole in his shoe.
“Did you find Straker?” I asked.
“Maybe tho,” Billy said, the missing teeth giving him a faint lisp. “There’s a feller around matching that description.” He eyed me cagily. “But I understand yer offering a reward?”
“Indeed,” I said impatiently. “Where did you see him?”
“Can’t be sure it’s him,” Billy said. “How much did you say it wath?”
I made up a number on the spot. “Fifty dollars, if it really is Mr. Straker.”
Billy tried to keep a poker face but I could see he was struggling. Fifty dollars was a small fortune.
“That’s before my commission,” Connor interjected smoothly. “Ten percent.”
“Aw, Connor,” Billy protested. “Five percent.”
“Take it or leave it,” Connor said, crossing his arms.
“But I gave you that rattail! Don’t it count for nothin’?”
“Ten percent.”
“Yer worse than a diddle cove, I thought we was friends!”
“We is friends,” Connor said regretfully. “But business is business.”
Billy mumbled something that sounded like “gripe-fist,” but he finally nodded.
“Alright,” he said, spitting in his palm and shaking hands with Connor, who did the same. “Ten percent.”
The negotiation concluded, Billy turned to me. “I’ll need to see a pitcher, if you got one. Make sure it’s the right feller.”
“Hold on.” I ran to my room and brought back the photograph of Brady and Straker in Wyoming. Billy examined it closely.
“The one with dark hair. Is it him?” I asked.
“Dunno. I’ll let you know later. After I go down there.”
“Where’s there?” I demanded impatiently.
“That’s confidential,” Billy said. “A feller’s gotta keep his professional sources to himthelf.”
“Well, this man could be very dangerous,” I said. “Do not approach him under any circumstances. All I want is an address.”
“Got it.”
I stared at him hard. “Be careful, Mr. Finn.”
“Don’t worry, I ain’t no noddle.” Billy stood up and put his cap on, a checkered thing about two sizes too large. “I can thee mythelf out.”
“Wait.” I gave him two quarters. “A feller’s got to eat supper,” I said with a smile.
Billy grinned. “That he doth, Mith Pell, that he doth.”
He slipped out the front door, whistling a cheerful tune. I watched through the window as his small form disappeared into the night.
“Be careful, Mr. Finn,” I whispered again, praying that I hadn’t just made a terrible mistake.
And then Mrs. Rivers called us for supper and I forgot all about Billy as we laughed and talked and stuffed ourselves with lamb stew and blueberry pie.
It was the last time I would do so for many days.
By ten-thirty the next morning, I stood with Edward outside a brownstone at 418 West Twentieth Street. The mighty Hudson shimmered less than a quarter mile distant, its waters bristling with the tall masts of sailing ships and the great steam funnels of the Rotterdam and Atlas Lines. It was a stately street of shade trees and Greek Revival, Italianate and Georgian townhouses, although just a block or so west, the residential neighborhood dissolved into a dodgy patchwork of warehouses, lumber yards and distilleries bounded by the Hudson River Railroad.
Number
418 had been divided into flats, and a small hand-lettered sign indicated that Mr. Charles Dawbarn lived on the top—and thus, the cheapest—floor.
“Ready?” Edward asked me, nervously smoothing his buff waistcoat. He was wearing Hessian boots with tassels over robin’s egg blue trousers and a yellow paisley cravat. The points of his collar were so high and stiff that Edward was forced to lean his head back slightly to accommodate them, but he didn’t seem to mind this at all.
“I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We ascended the stairs and knocked on the door of number four. It was opened by a man who looked strikingly like my Uncle Arthur, except that he was older by several decades. He had short dark hair parted on the side and a large, walrusy mustache. He must have been well over six feet tall, with an athletic build just starting to soften into the paunch of late middle age.
“May I help you?” he inquired.
“I certainly hope so,” Edward said heartily. “I read about your talents in the Banner of Light. We were hoping you might be willing to assist us in communicating with someone on the other side.” Edward took my hand tenderly in his own. “My sister, Katie, is to be married, you see. But she desires to confirm that the prospective groom has the complete blessing of our mother, who passed away three years ago.”
Mr. Dawbarn nodded and stood aside. “Of course. Please come in.”
He led us into a small parlor, where a ginger cat perched in the center of a round wooden table. Mr. Dawbarn shooed the cat away and pulled shut the curtains.
“What we embark upon is no less than a journey beyond the physical realm to higher dimensions,” he intoned, lighting several candles and arranging them on the table. “A piercing of the veil between life and death. I myself have personally communed with hundreds of spirits, and each has been a unique experience. I prefer to work with groups of five or more, as the collective energy to summon the desired spirit is greater. But I am willing to attempt it for your sister’s sake, as such a potent connection as parent and child makes such manifestations easier.”